Music-theoretic traditions tend to privilege encoded structures – harmonic function, formal templates, syntactic progressions – often treating listening as their confirmation in time. Encoded logic is indispensable, but analytically insufficient if treated as the starting or sole point. For the listener, functional and formal categories do not operate as starting points; they emerge gradually through experiential listening as music unfolds.

This paper proposes a reversal of analytic strategy. Instead of asking how structures generate experience, it asks how experience makes structure analytically available. At the centre of this approach are perceptually salient parameters – essentially Meyer's statistical parameters, such as dynamics, register, spatial and temporal density, tempo, and timbre – which shape emotional response and temporal trajectory in real time. These parameters organize listening directly, in continuous interaction with pitch organization and other encoded relations.

Through focused analytical examples, this paper examines how parametric trajectories generate felt temporality and guide musical experience. In some cases, functional relations interact closely with these perceptual processes; in others, perceptually salient parameters play a leading role in shaping coherence, even where syntactic relations remain operative but do not provide the primary experiential anchor.

The proposed approach is illustrated through two excerpts that foreground different aspects of experiential listening. The first is drawn from Mussorgsky's Coronation Scene from Boris Godunov, where musical coherence is shaped primarily through parametric changes. The passage unfolds as a prolonged oscillation between two dominant-seventh sonorities (Ab7 and D7) linked by a shared tritone, yielding minimal harmonic differentiation and no conventional cadential closure. Instead of goal-directed harmonic progression, listeners experience form through evolving parametric trajectories. Formal articulation emerges not through syntactic arrival, but through collapse and liquidation: moments where accumulated energy dissipates, and temporal pressure is released. Here, statistical parameters govern continuity and closure against a background of harmonic stasis.

The second example, Scriabin's Op. 56/3, brings pitch organization back into play while preserving the primacy of experiential listening. This miniature is exemplary in its interaction of two essential scalar qualities: tonic-quality (I-Quality, centred on a major-seventh core) and dominant-quality (V-Quality, centred on a dominant-seventh nucleus). Structures associated with these pitch groups function initially as qualisigns, possessing distinct dispositional tendencies toward relative stasis or propulsion. Crucially, their stabilization depends on affordance by parametric trajectories: coordinated parametric changes activate, intensify, or suspend these pitch-based dispositions. Only through such behaviour do scalar qualities acquire legisign status, projecting locally binding zones of tension and repose. Here, pitch organization and statistical parameters operate in tight reciprocity, demonstrating how syntactic meaning emerges from experiential conditions rather than preceding them.

The present contribution is not a rejection of structural analysis, but a reorientation of its explanatory focus. By foregrounding perceptually salient parameters as agents of felt temporality, the paper offers an analytic perspective capable of accounting for musical coherence across repertoires in which encoded structures and experiential processes interact in different proportions. Musical meaning, on this view, is constituted through perceptual organization in time and articulated through formal and harmonic frameworks in analytic reflection.