WittenLab. Zukunftslabor Studium fundamentale

Research Area Phenomenology of Music

Since ancient times, music has challenged the great philosophers to revise existing concepts and thought patterns. The philosophical examination of music, which draws on the phenomenological tradition, produced insights a hundred years ago that were later confirmed by the findings of neuropsychological research. Above all, they concern the way in which our consciousness gives meaning and significance to sound waves, how our brain uses certain cognitive schemata to assemble and disassemble sound sequences, how our consciousness connects musical processes with extra-musical content, images and forms, how our imaginary body is set in virtual motion by music, how our perception of music is characterised by concepts and values.

Following on from this tradition, we conduct humanities studies on individual musical works or texts about music, but occasionally also refer to the results of current empirical research.

With our seminars, we aim to teach music in a sophisticated way. We challenge the common practice of listening to music that cultivates habits of listening to music in between to brighten up everyday life, googling while listening and immediately searching for a new track if the listening experience is not satisfying enough.

We encourage students to engage in unusual listening experiences without additional visual and textual information in order to train their awareness to gain valuable insights from purely acoustic processes.

Through our listening exercises, students learn to separate everyday acoustic perception from artistic worlds of perception. In the former, sound is inextricably linked to the sounding object of the visible world; in the latter, it is detached from its relationship to the spatial-objective world.