DEBELLIS (2009) ARGUES THAT INTROSPECTIONIST music theory, as represented in my book The Cognition of Basic Musical Structures (CBMS; Temperley, 2001), makes an ungrounded assumption that the intuitions of the author are shared by other theorists and by experienced listeners generally. But this inductive leap is motivated by experimental and corpus evidence showing that, with regard to basic structures such as meter, listeners largely do hear things in the same way; and this assumption is confirmed in CBMS by corpus tests in which my analyses are compared to those of other listeners. DeBellis suggests that what I was doing in CBMS was not accessing unconscious representations, but rather bringing new representations into existence. But this implies either that experienced listeners in general do not represent meter at all, or that they arrive at metrical analyses by a pre-theoretic process that is not available to music theorists; neither of these options is plausible.
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December 2009
Research Article|
December 01 2009
In Defense of Introspectionism: A Response to DeBellis
David Temperley
David Temperley
Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester
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Music Perception (2009) 27 (2): 131–138.
Citation
David Temperley; In Defense of Introspectionism: A Response to DeBellis. Music Perception 1 December 2009; 27 (2): 131–138. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/mp.2009.27.2.131
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