Event Detail

When we listen to music, we not only hear sounds, but also “feel a beat” under the sounds—a repeating pulse, or meter. Sometimes, however, we lose the beat, or switch to feeling a different one. And when we do, the music sounds different. But the music itself is manifestly the same. So what changes—why does the music sound different? The answer, I argue, is that there is a change in our way of perceptually measuring sounds and patterns in sound—not (or not always) a change in which sounds, or patterns in sound, are measured. I’ll close by drawing a few morals for a more general debate about why things appear the way they do in perceptual experience.