Hearing Musicians Making Music. A Critique of Roger Scruton's notion of `Acousmatic Experience'

Roger Scruton’s ontology of sound is found lacking because it removes from music the import of the performer’s manipulating of his instrument. The ontology misconceives the phenomenology of hearing. And, consequently, the aesthetics of music’s acousmatic space misconceives our understanding of music as an art. I argue that the primary, thick appreciation of music as an art assumes that the musician’s manipulations be audible in the music, that these manipulations have psychological reality, and that it is this psychological reality which brings to life the musical work’s expressiveness, thickly conceived.