Deus ex machina: psychodynamics of identity in sound streams

In addressing the question of how the temporal Arts are ‘preserved’, this paper aims to throw light on the mind of the listener as interpreter-conspirator, by proposing that Peter Mark Roget (1779- 1869)’s ‘Classification of Ideas’ from the introduction to his Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases (1852), can be viewed as the subjective presentation of the structure of a shared system of signification by which artists, spectators and auditors alike, make sense of their art.