Exertion, Expectation, Synthesis

Abstract René Descartes's Compendium Musicae (1618/1650) famously lays out a series of eight axiomatic Preliminaries pertaining to sensory perception; it continues with a remarkable passage describing the experience of synthetically perceiving musical rhythm and form. Although comparatively less known, the rest of the work also contains significant innovations, particularly with regard to certain psychological characteristics of the perceiving subject. The authors’ close reading of the entire Compendium reveals an unexpectedly nuanced and fairly self-consistent understanding of the role of the senses and the imagination in musical perception. More specifically, the authors argue that Descartes recognizes three distinguishable, interactive aspects of music perception: degree of aural exertion, syntactical expectation, and synthetic apprehension. These, as the authors show, are integral to the Compendium's sketch of a proto-psychological account of the experience of music in time, possibly the first Western music-theoretical account of music in psychological and processive terms. The treatise's significance thus lies less in its association with the emerging physico-mathematical science of its age—as has so often been claimed to its detriment—than in its startlingly prescient character as a harbinger of the modern field of music cognition.