Questions about the Process of Musical Surface Segmentation in the Perception of Contemporary and Electroacoustics Musics.

Several of the current theories used to model musical perception work on tonal music and postulate that our perception carries out an extraction of gestalten from the sound continuum, grouping them in perceptive units and organizing them in a sequential hierarchization. From this point of view, this perceptive organization concerns the musical surface segmentation. This article develops an analysis based on the perception of non-tonal music and proposes an inversion of that theoretical model. Thus, to perceive music would not be to carry out an analysis that extracts discontinuities of a global functional unit, but an activity that makes an articulated continuity emerge from discrete elements, which were postulated by the composer. These elements have a sound morphology and a function in the discourse of the musical work. I call these discrete elements morphofunctional elements. The model is based on an analysis of the main transformations of Western music during the 20th century, in particular on the dissolution of the concept of musical form. The theory uses some phenomenological concepts about the awareness of temporal objects, as well as enaction as an approach of perceptive activity. Perception is thus understood not like data processing but like the action that constitutes the perceived phenomenon.