Panaiotidi, E. G. ‘Music Sounds as the Emotion Feels’. The Principle of the Internal Similarity in the Theory of the Esthetics of Music

Abstract: Based on the example of the concept offered by a British scientist Malcolm Budd, the author of the article views the strategy used by scientists to prove the relation between music ad emotion based on the principle of cross-categorical similarity between the sound of music and one’s emotional experience. Using the idea of ‘make-believe’ introduced by Kendall Walton as an additional explicit mean as well as the three disjunctive ‘imaginative projects’ explaining the possible ways of perceiving emotional expressive music, Budd’s concept tends to fully explain the phenomenon of music expression and emotional impact made by music. The main purpose of the research was to describe the explicit potentials of Budd’s concept and the main research method used by the researcher was the method of conceptual analysis. The researcher concludes that the analogy principle cannot be used at the core of the basic concept of musical expression because it has certain limits and cannot cover all possible forms of musical expression of emotion. It also has certain limits when used as the methodological principle lying in the basis of the synthetic approach integrating different explicit means.

Keywords: