Book one. Making music. The instrumental prerequisite ; Playing an instrument ; Capturing sounds ; Acousmatics -- Book two. Hearing. "What can be heard" ; The four listening modes ; Scientific prejudice ; The hearing intention -- Book three. Correlations between the physical signal and the musical object. Ambiguities in musical acoustics ; Correlation between spectra and pitches ; Thresholds and transients ; Temporal anamorphoses I: timbres and dynamics ; Temporal anamorphoses II: timbre and instrument ; Time and duration -- Book four. Objects and structures. Reduction to the object ; Perceptual structures ; Comparative structures: music and language ; The conventional musical system: musicality and sonority ; Natural sound structures: musicianly listening ; The reduced listening system: musical dualism ; Musical research ; Morphology of sound objects ; The laboratory ; Typology of musical objects (I): classification criteria ; Typology (II): balanced and redundant objects ; Typology (III): eccentric sounds ; Working at our instrument -- Book six. Theory of musical objects. Musical experience ; Generalising music theory ; Theory of homogeneous sounds: criterion of mass ; Theory of fixed masses: dynamic criterion ; Theory of sustainment ; Theory of variations ; Analysis of the musical object as it generally appears ; Implementation ; The meaning of music -- Penultimate chapter : in search of music itself -- Post-script