Abstract

The notion of 'imaging' music ought to perplex us philosophically, for 'to imagine' is a verb of visualisation. Hearing musical events may cause us to imagine things, and seeing things may cause us to think of hearing musical events, but to speak of visualising how we hear when hearing musically is to echo an innervating confusion. The primary space within which we encounter things is auditory/tactile rather than visual. To think accurately of music, and especially so when composing it, one must retrain oneself to think of it non-visually, avoiding the commonplace 'imaginings' of the formalisations of mathematical structures, for example, that so often reduce what we hear thereafter to mere exemplifications of them lacking any hope of musical fascination.