In Defense of Introspectionism: A Response to DeBellis

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.