ABSTRACT
Music is sound, clearly, but when listeners report their experience of listening to music, they often recount sensations of light, space and movement. Hearing music is not just a sonic experience, but also one which recruits senses other than hearing to create experiences which range from the mundane to the sublime. This chapter investigates listeners' non-sonic sensations in listening to music, in the context of four hypothesized theoretical explanations. It draws on three sources of accounts of musical experience, two from other published sources and one from our own research. Music can bring a memory to mind sufficiently strongly for the listener to sense something associated with that memory. Memory of some particular earlier occasion or period when the music has been heard is often reported as a cause of strong musical experiences. The chapter concludes with observations about the value of listening to music, and how experience of music might be fundamentally changing as a result of technological innovations.
