Dr. Joel Smith - On, 'The Phenomenology Of Music'

This podcast explores the phenomenology of music, focusing on how music appears to us and how we describe the experience of music. It challenges the expression and arousal theories of emotion in music, proposing instead that music resembles emotions or other qualities like delicacy and harshness. The discussion uses examples from Oscar Peterson and Björk to illustrate how music can metaphorically sound sad, delicate, or harsh. Listeners ask about cultural differences in musical metaphors, the role of convention versus inherent qualities in music, and the implications of this theory for music creation. The expert suggests that while cultural context influences which resemblances we notice, objective similarities exist between music and emotional expressions or qualities, independent of culture.