Musical Understanding as a Dialogue Between Culture and Mind: A Cognitive-Hermeneutic Perspective

Abstract

The article examines the possibility of a cognitive-hermeneutic understanding of music as a space of dialogical interpretation between cultural traditions and the listener’s individual cognitive experience. A musical work is considered not as a closed system but as a multilayered phenomenon, rooted in its cultural–historical context and continually re-experienced by listeners through their cognitive engagement. Within the cognitive-hermeneutic perspective, musical perception and understanding are viewed as a dynamic field of meaning in which the subject encounters alterity (in Ricoeur’s sense of “oneself as another”) embedded in the sounding text and its broader cultural–historical context. The article analyzes the enduring tendencies and current debates in the philosophy of music, the psychology of musical perception, and interdisciplinary research on musical experience, including New Musicology, Lawrence Kramer’s musical hermeneutics, R. Taruskin’s critique of musical autonomy, as well as approaches within cognitive musicology, Johnson and Lakoff’s conception of the embodied and metaphorical nature of musical thinking, and Huron’s account of predictive mechanisms in shaping the listener’s emotional experience. A separate section is devoted to recent neuroscientific studies that strengthen the cognitive-hermeneutic position by demonstrating that musical perception and understanding are not processes of static decoding but individual events of meaning-formation. The article discusses pioneering research on reconstructing musical sound from human auditory-cortex activity using nonlinear decoding models, as well as findings on the effects of musical engagement as a non-pharmacological means of influencing cognitive functions, assessed through network-level measures such as modularity and flexibility. Taken together, these ideas and studies demonstrate that musical perception and understanding constitute an active process of meaning-making in which the listener assumes a co-creative role.