Quasi-Hearing in Husserl, Levinson, and Gordon

This essay brings out the conceptual confluence in Husserl’s early account on the perception of music, Levinson’s notion of quasi-hearing, and Gordon’s concept of audiation. They all ascribe a central role to our capability of integrating acoustic information spread out over some time and take it to render musical understanding possible. The interval of this integration process, i.e. the extension of the ‘Zeithof’ or the ‘temporal window of quasi-hearing’, was found to be on the order of ten seconds. It also turned out that all three approaches describe rather low level auditory processes. Besides, it is this very investigation of the fine-structure of integrating sensual information over some time interval which leads Husserl to a very general ‘theory of meaning’; namely one which is applicable not only to music but also to language and which certainly has commonsense on its side.