ABSTRACT
Akoumenology, or the phenomenology of sound, is a relatively young branch of general phenomenology. It is also a science emergent from the principles of phenomenology coupled with the experience of musical sound. Edmund Husserl modeled his conception of time on the “protensive” character of a musical melody, extending in sequence from past through present into the future, and leaving a “retensive” trail in memory. The importance of temporal unity in musical tonality becomes thematic in Husserl’s treatment of passive synthesis, and detail emerges more convincingly. The musical example Husserl employs to describe this is illuminating. Musical sound perdures from moment to moment, he writes, and it is synthetically one throughout all these individual moments. One sees how important a musical model was for the founder of phenomenology, and how important phenomenological insights can be for musicology. In musicology one gets pinned down to opus numbers, dates, and scores, as well as to manuscripts from the middle ages and the renaissance.
