Melbourne Conservatorium of Music - Theses

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“A Thousand Twangling Instruments”: Towards a Functional View of Inner Music

Chadwick, Remy ( 2023)

In the words of Shakespeare’s character Caliban, music can sometimes take the form of inward “humming” about the ears – an experience without external sonic stimulus. However, there are currently too many distinct scholarly terms referring to this experience. This thesis calls for a functional view of inner music to resolve definitional issues in the literature. To address the problem, I explore the topic from psychological and philosophical perspectives, and from the interdisciplinary intersection of these disciplines. My study outlines the available research and investigates an emerging hypothesis in the literature: the music memory corpus. Applying this hypothesis to musical expectations, music recollections, and inner compositions, I propose a functional, interdisciplinary conception of inner music. Such a conception may enlighten the nature of music, which in turn holds significance for theoretical and practical domains in which music is applied. This thesis concludes with key questions for the future study of the topic.