An excerpt from Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus about #music and ambiguity:
« Relationship [in music] is everything. And if you want to give it a more precise name, it is "ambiguity." To illustrate the meaning of the word, he played for me chord-progressions belonging to no definite key; demonstrated for me how such a progression fluctuates between C major and G major, if one leaves out the F [...] how it keeps the ear uncertain [...] "You know what I find?" he asked. "That music turns the equivocal into a system. Take this or that note. You can understand it so or respectively so. You can think of it as sharpened or flattened, and you can, if you are clever, take advantage of the double sense as much as you like." »
This somewhat echoes the conclusion of a scientific paper by Pressnitzer, Suied and Shamma on #Auditory Scene Analysis :
« Music is an especially challenging stimulus to make sense, as most of it is abstract without any clear reference to an external object. By embedding several latent perceptual organizations into complex acoustical scenes, music may well be able to challenge the listener with a rich set of possibilities that can be freely entertained, with no other potential consequence than being surprised, rejoiced, or moved. » https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2011.00158/full #ASA #AuditorySceneAnalysis #MusicPerception #Cognition #CognitiveScience