On Experiencing Music from Within.

This article examines the nature of experiencing emotion "from within" when listening to music, challenging Kendall Walton's claim that listeners imagine their auditory experience itself as an experience of emotion. Instead, it proposes that listeners imagine the music's sounds as their own expressive behavior, and through a process involving both stipulative and involuntary imagining, they come to imagine feeling the emotion conveyed by the music. This imaginative process parallels how people ordinarily infer their own emotions by perceiving characteristic bodily behaviors and states, running this inference "offline" during listening. The account aligns with, but extends, the resemblance theory of musical expression by emphasizing internal perception of one's imagined behavior rather than external observation, thereby explaining why certain pieces reliably evoke specific imagined emotions.