In its first phase, our process of gaining knowledge in music is of empirical nature.
This is the stage on which we listeners comprehend the outer sounding musical work in terms of its structure.

In its narrowness, however, this empirical comprehension is directly expanded when our intellect begins to examine the tonal patterns for their musical content when it verifies and validates them.

Our intellect then conveys the results of its evaluation to our self-awareness; and our self-awareness starts, on its own and completely naturally, with perfecting the musical statement.
In doing so, our self-awareness compares the insights conveyed by the intellect with its own nature with our very own insights, thus putting our own inherent faculties of cognition to natural, musical-creative action.

Hereby, our self-awareness uses the information of the music reverberating outside as a pattern of association, imperfect though it may be, to stimulate the tonal patterns of association, which exist in us already in a latent and more perfect form, to vibrate.

Stimulated in that way, the cognitive faculties of our intellect get creatively active to provide our self-awareness with a more complete, more harmonious musical picture than the outer performance affords.

Thus, by means of the formative forces of our intellect under their control, the creative forces of our self-awareness structure the sequence-space, the motif-space, and the musical sound-space from within its own natural harmony, and directed outwardly towards our mind.
Finally the concert reverberates in the mind of the “creative music listener” in its perfection.

In this way, our self-awareness, and also our feeling and our understanding, are satisfied and enjoy the live musical truth which now forms a harmonious, manifold union in the resounding spaces of our mind.

The “comparison” of the outer musical interpretation with the lively art of tones rooted in our self-awareness is in essence drawing from something inwardly existing, and therefore it is not creating something really new.
This function of “comparison” corresponds much rather to discovering a musical reality which already exists and which swings within the silence; “creating” therefore corresponds here rather to “remembering” through outside stimulation but not to the conception of something truly new.