Music and mind — a theory of aesthetic dynamics

Brian D. Josephson

Tethys Carpenter

pp. 280-287

in: Ramesh Mishra Kumar, D. Maas, Eduard Zwierlein (eds), On self-organization, Berlin, Springer, 1994

Abstract

It is argued that purely perceptual or generative accounts of music are inadequate to account for its specificity, and that proper accounts of music must take into account also a more fundamental level of the mind (or of consciousness), a level we term the "aesthetic subsystem". The latter constitutes a domain of universality and of meaning that acts in conjunction with more peripheral aspects of cognition. Suggestive parallels with systems such as biosystems and lasers are used to account for a number of features of musical processes in terms of the model.