with Ron McClamrock
When watching a film, the object which one most notices is not the light and sound per se, nor is it the nearby vibrating speaker or flickering screen. One encounters instead a performance or a fictional world. Robert Hopkins describes this experience of a fictional world as collapsed seeing-in. Enrico Terrone extends this idea to recorded music: The object which one most notices is not the sound or the vibrating speaker, but a fiction. Yet, he suggests, the fiction one encounters in pop music is not a story but a feeling. We explore and extend this idea, arguing that the experience of music is more diverse than the experience of film. There are many possible collapse phenomena, distinguished by what the listener’s experience collapses to. Possibilities include the fictional first-person experience of the song persona’s emotions, fictional second-person heartfelt connection to the song persona, third-person experience of a fictional musical performance, and fictional first-person experience of the agency of playing the music.
The first on-line draft of this paper was posted 20nov2025.