Actually, some of what I say here is based somewhat on how I actually am. Normally, for a music listener, the specious present includes a significant number of notes, maybe a bar or more, and these are heard as a temporally extended unity, while my hearing is perfectly normal, I only hear two or three notes at once. The notes come into my consciousness, and then they disappear. As a result, I have almost no appreciation of instrumental music. I do better with vocal. And of course I am almost completely unable to reproduce music, unless there is some purely mechanical process. Nonetheless, I have no doubt that music is objectively beautiful--I sense some of that with my diminished music-listening abilities, and I somehow sense that there is so much more there than what I can hear. Besides, I accept this on the authority of more competent hearers. I can recall each past wave with complete precision. But I do not see the patterns that make these waves into music.
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