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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 December 2018
Touch is world-directed, temporally extended, exploratory contact and movement. It was by modelling his theory of perception on touch that Alva Noë was able to show (in Action in Perception, 2006) that perceptual experience acquires content through our physical interactions with the world, that the detail we perceive in the world ‘is experienced by us as out there, not as in our minds’ (p. 33). In this essay, I share some thoughts on how understanding musical experience on these terms, as touch-like, may be a useful means of looking past the work-concept to the wider field of musical possibilities beyond. I begin by briefly considering the phenomenology of touch, which serves as the basis for the argument that follows.
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