Who Listens?

"Chapter 1 describes how the cognitive process of analogy can be used as a framework for analyzing how individual listeners relate what they are hearing to what they may have heard or learned in musical and other experiences in the past. The framework emphasizes the cognitive steps a person takes when making an analogy of any kind: (1) retrieval-remembering patterns and associations based on experience; (2) mapping-aligning situations; and (3) inference transfer- transferring inferences/associations, recognizing manipulations. I use this process to analyze hearings of Western art music, illustrating not only how listeners might analogize music to other domains (such as the body or language) as a framing analogy for their listening experience, but also how they might analogize details of the music they are currently hearing to music they have heard in the past, creating what I call music-to-music analogies"--