The structure of cultural experience

•This paper considers an aspect of culture rarely formally studied by sociologists: the organization of sensory experience.•We develop and employ a novel technique aimed at measuring music experience.•We analyze the dimensionality of the distribution of reported experiences.•Analyses reveal three dimensions of experience, which appear to stretch between poles that correspond to binaries of embodied experience. The theories of William James and John Dewey regarding the nature of experience suggest that there is an aspect of the organization of culture that sociologists have not yet studied formally, namely the structuring of sensory experience. We propose a way of trying to measure respondents’ experience of “textural” music, as opposed to their preferences, evaluative judgments, or associations. We employ a novel data-gathering approach as part of 61 in-depth interviews, and then analyze the dimensionality of the distribution of reported experiences. We find three dimensions, all of which seem to touch upon fundamentally meaningful binaries of embodied experience.