The Organs of Cognition in the Process of Gaining Knowledge
in Music

Once the listener knows the natural musical experience of a music creator, then it is his desire to stabilize this world of experience within himself, too.

Only after having adopted this inner art of self-knowledge, learning the outer craft of music makes sense to him.
Then he can assume the responsibility to inspire others for higher knowledge, indeed, for the supreme self-cognition with which he has now become familiar himself.

Music knows the indirect as well as the direct way of gaining knowledge.
Relating both to our tools of cognition, we find very different circumstances resulting from the indirectness or the directness of our gaining knowledge.

Our outer ear, for example, perceives the tone directly in the acoustic space and transmits the information of the tone structure to our mind. The mind creates a reflection of this tone, and our inner sense of hearing perceives this reflection of tone.
While our outer ear perceives the tone in the acoustic space directly, our inner ear recognizes this tone only indirectly through its replica in our mind.

Our inner organ of hearing conveys the information of the sound to our intellect, and our understanding infers the parameters which determine the tone structure – for example, the pitch, the proportion of the overtones, the volume and with it the volume of the individual overtones, the duration of the individual overtones, and so on.

From our inner sense of hearing our feeling gathers the information as to the degree of density of the information, and of the warmth that is present in the sounding event – and thus, also of the malleability of the sound.

Our understanding and our feeling evaluate the information on the sound quality which flows to them from our sense of hearing, and these tools of cognition, too, receive this knowledge about the sound only indirectly – in the fourth degree, while the inner sense of hearing still received a third-degree information from the mind.
(Our outer organ of hearing, our ear, gathered a first-degree information of the sound from the acoustic space; our mind gathered a second-degree sound-information from the neuro-physiology of the ear; our inner sense of hearing gathered a third-degree sound-information from our mind, and now our feeling and understanding gather from our inner sense of hearing a fourth-degree information.)

Our intellect hands over to our self-consciousness the information that flows to it through feeling and understanding along with the results of its examinations.
At every step of this flow of information through our tools of cognition, through our intellect – through our mind, through our inner sense of hearing, and through feeling and understanding – to our self-awareness, the information about the tone is subjected to change, or to a filtering.

Our outer organ of hearing draws from the sound, that reverberates in the acoustic space, only as much information as it is capable of perceiving, and here the threshold of hearing represents its natural limit.

Our mind, in turn, represents only as much of the acoustic event as it is capable of representing, and the accuracy of its representation depends on the operational quality of the neurophysiology – i.e. on the degree of our neurophysiological integration.

If the sound, which reverberates in the acoustic space and which is transmitted via our outer organ of hearing to our mind, is very complex, and if its parameters change in a very subtle manner, then it may well happen that our mind does not produce a replica of a sound equally subtly structured, because our neurophysiology cannot transmit to our mind fast enough all the manifold elements of the tonal structural change as it evolves.

In such a case, only a quasi similar tone is generated in our mind, a sound with a simplified pattern, which has abandoned many individual components of the sound – fine nuances of its shape.
Thus, the sound which reverberates in all its diversity in the acoustic space, does not really reach our mind.