A Language for Musical Qualia

In this commentary I build on Phil Barnard’s distinction of implicational and propositional meanings as an incentive to explore possibilities for bridging the two types of meanings. I argue that, contrary to the claim that musical experiences are ineffable, the subtle implicational meanings that make up the experiential richness of musical qualia may be amenable to linguistic description and objectification, provided that a suitable language is being used. Taking music-evoked emotional experiences as an example, I sketch the contours of such a language and also discuss criteria by which the suitability of a language to characterize musical qualia may be evaluated.