Have you noticed how the very same piece of music can have different meanings at different times?

Let’s think about a hypothetical song and call it ‘N’. When you first heard N it didn’t really strike you, but after a couple of listens it began to stir a feeling of excitement and joy in you. This feeling lasted for a few more plays but after a few weeks of listening to the song the excitement waned and you began to find N to be rather boring. A few years later you heard the song again and it made you feel melancholy, evoking a time in the past when your sense of self was palpably different.

What the experiences I have described above should tell us about the song is that its meaning is not contained within the song itself but is instead located in our reaction to it.

But what…