By way of a multidisciplinary approach, this article advances the idea that our listening to certain practices of contemporary art music (electroacoustic, classical contemporary, and electronic music) relies on precise connections to the early stage of perception. These styles of music are characterised by essential sound configurations that evolve in time, thus eliciting a sensorial impact which transcends features regarding sound sources and affective responses. Listeners grasp what Scruton calls ‘pure events’ in a ‘world of sound’, being able to distinguish, separate and sort acoustic stimuli. The article establishes a key parallel among seminal works of Bregman, McAdams, Kubovy, Bayle and other authors, highlighting a fundamental agreement of perceptual studies in psychology, neurophysiology and musicology for the understanding of the early stage of sound perception. Music practices typical of this perspective develop certain sound configurations, such as figure/ground arrangements, recurrent elements and morphological distinction, that closely mirror our innate mechanisms of prediction in perception. A parallel is made between studies in the philosophy of perception and the neurophysiology which allows us to postulate the idea that these styles of music are essentially based on pure temporal proto-objects.

This paper enquires into the nature of the connections between memory and certain genres of contemporary art music whose unique features rely particularly on our early mnemonic processes. Specific sound configurations of this music are often associated, during listening, with visual and tactile sensorial qualities and with abstract geometries. They are perceived fundamentally as the results of acoustic-physical forces and energies and are organized according to Gestalt and kinesthetic principles. This kind of music calls for a specific listening attitude, which we define as the vertical stance, and seems particularly apt to respond to mechanisms of the working memory where echoic, short- and long-term memories assume a central role. In this vertical stance, memory is involved in the mental construction (segregation, storage, and prediction) of the Gestalt configurations of this music within a perceptual domain that crucially has no spatial connection to the external world. In tying in neurophysiological and psychological research with musicological theories, we discuss the perceptual approach to these music practices in the light of the philosophical concept of the ‘No-Space world’ as conceived by the philosopher Peter Strawson. We propose that – under certain conditions – memory may be the realm of the purely spectro-temporal features of music. The sound configurations of this music in particular are part of an internal-external perceptual framework, being decoded in the conceptual space of perception and able to elicit high-order recollections typical of an embodied engagement with the external world.

On the scientific worldview, space and time are taken to be the inextricable dimensions of a single structure called space-time. Everything that exists in time also exists in space. There are no instants or intervals in time detached from spatial locations.Space and time are closely intertwined even in the ordinary worldview. We ascribe reality primarily to things such as portions of matter, living organisms and concrete artifactsthat is, individual things that exist in space-time. However, the ordinary worldview seems to have room also for individual entities existing in time but not in space. Minds or souls were once prominent candidate entities of this sort, but nowadays the most favored examples are entities created within certain social and cultural practices.In this respect, Rohrbaugh (2003, 200) talks about "historical individuals" such as linguistic texts or musical compositions being "in time but not in space." Thomasson (1999, 36) describes fictional characters as "abstract artifacts" that "lack a spatiotemporal location," but specifies that their existence can have a beginning and an end in time. Ferraris (2005, 42) claims that social objects such as debts, contracts, and even nations "do not exist as such in space but subsist as traces (inscriptions, records in people's minds) and, through these traces, acquire duration in time". Smith (2003, 23) calls "freestanding Y terms" objects like symphonies, debts or corporations, which can exist independently of a particular spatial embodiment, and observes that "a symphony (as contrasted with the performance of a symphony) is not a token physical entity at all; ratherlike a debt, or a corporationit is a special type of abstract formation (an abstract formation with a beginning, and perhaps an ending, in time)." Scruton (2009, 50) argues that sounds also are purely temporal entities since they basically are "pure events [...] identifiable separately both from the things that emit them and from the places where they are located."In this paper we propose to clarify 1) in what sense there may be individual entities that exist only in time and 2) what relationship links the existence of such purely temporal entities with the 1 Both authors made equal contributions to this work. We are especially grateful to Sarah De Sanctis and Alfredo Paternoster for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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