Like all the arts, music requires perception or refers to it; supposes it, even. But from the fact that music supposes perception, all philosophical aesthetics abusively conclude an originary continuity between one and the other; continuity is confused with 'pre-supposition'. Musical materialism, technologism, realism, and idealism are founded upon this common conclusion, this refusal to examine the exact and limited nature of this presupposition of perception. Music then becomes a more or less distanced, reified, deficient mode of perception – or indeed a more or less idealized, or even differed, mode, and so on. The realist illusion proper to philosophy (even, and above all when it is idealist) – its auto-factualization – impregnates the theory of music with its fetishism, giving it, across apparently contradictory aesthetics, one and the same figurative (so to speak) conception. The task of a rigorous thought is rather to found – at least in principle – an abstract theory of music – but radically abstract, absolutely non-worldly and non-perceptual. Traditional, that is to say merely philosophical, interpretations of music are made on the basis of one of the transcendent elements inscribed in the World – the ear, the instrument and its techniques, the sound and the theme, the choice of sound, of the song, of the concert. That is, they are made on the basis of a semiology or a phenomenology, doctrines that start out by ceding too much to the World, only to withdraw out of note, from the essence of the note, by interpreting it too quickly in relation to the transcendence of the World alone. They found themselves on the faith in perception supposedly at the basis of the musical act.

How exactly does the musician, through body, ear, instrument, relate to the World? In a manner such as only a phenomenology – a phenomenology of being-musical-in-the-World – could describe? Or rather in a manner necessary in a World that is contingent as such, which would prohibit a phenomenology or an ontology or music? Is the musician in the World and in History, making a recording of them, an event, working them without extracting or tearing something from them? Otherwise, if philosophy is already the music of the World, and thus also of the World of music, why would music itself not be outside the World? In what utopic or pre-territorial place? The musical act is a certain type of opening, but can we be so sure that every opening gives onto the World? Is this act merely a case of a musical decision, of something like a technical and observational retreat in relation to things, but all the better to assure its hold (sounded or magical) on them?

To the techno-musico-worldly or figurative hypothesis which is that of philosophy, we oppose a wholly other general hypothesis – that of a radical abstraction that music perhaps does not realize fully in itself, but in relation to which it can be situated and interpreted afresh. To the transcendent paradigm of philosophy which remains within onto-musicological Difference, we oppose the stance of the most naïve and most intrinsically realist knowledge a stance that appears to us essential – more so than calculation and measurement to the definition of the essence of science. In what ways is the knowledge immanent to the musician's stance, from this point of view, of the order of the scientific; or at least descended from the latter; and what is it that ultimately distinguishes it from the scientific, making of it an art rather than a science? This last question gives us to perceive the complexity of the general hypothesis that will serve as our guiding thread: to what extent is music not an activity, for example, of a kind with Artificial Intelligence (AI) – an attempt at the technological simulation not of the World in its objective reality, in its philosophico-cultural reality, but of science and of the reality that science can describe naïvely in the last instance? Like AI, music would be a science reliant on technology, or a technology realizing a somewhat scientific naïve relation to the World – to its reality, at least insofar as science itself gives this reality only in the last instance. Not an artificial perception of the World (this would suppose the philosophical model of perception), but an artificial science or a technological simulation of science, supposing once more, one last time, the World in its transcendent reality. Musical technology would be charged with realizing to the maximum the real musical order as a symbolization (partially still under the laws of the World) of science and of its stance, taken here as rule or norm. We would no longer interpret music as a knowledge that doubles the World, but on the contrary as a technique that simulates science, a form of knowledge that represents an attempt to insert science into the conditions of existence of the World and above all of perception; a hybrid of science and perception ensured by technology. To understand music we must, in any case, cease to take perception and being-in-the-World as our paradigm, and instead take the scientific experience of the World as our guide. We will then see emerge music's variance from science, a variance that will define its sense as an artistic practice. This artistic sense should be read as the between-two of the hearing-in-science and perception or being-in-the-World, and as a variance ensured by a technology …

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