For mu­si­cal cog­ni­tion proper the sense of hear­ing is not at all re­quired.
It only pro­vides our ac­tual or­gans of mu­si­cal know­ing – our self-con­scious­ness, and our in­tel­lect en­dowed with feel­ing and un­der­stand­ing – with the sound­ing in­for­ma­tion about the tones.

How­ever, just as within some­one’s physi­ol­ogy his soul is liv­ing, within the tones the soul of mu­sic is liv­ing.
And just as the soul enli­vens man from within and moves him, the co­or­di­nated pow­ers of form­ing, i.e. motif, melody, se­quence, and har­mony per­vade the mu­si­cal sound-space as the soul of mu­sic, and set it vi­brat­ing lively.

Dur­ing crea­tive mu­sic lis­ten­ing where, owing to the condensation of our in­tel­lect, we iden­tify our­selves with our self-aware­ness to a much greater ex­tent than with our outer or­gan of hear­ing, the su­preme mu­si­cal knowl­edge is the ex­peri­ence of the har­mony, and this ex­peri­ence brings about an in­te­gra­tion of the self-aware­ness with our in­tel­lect.
Through this in­te­gra­tion we raise our in­tel­lect to the same status of high struc­tural den­sity which our self-aware­ness natu­rally pos­sesses.

If we fur­ther in­crease the imme­diacy of our mu­si­cal ex­peri­ence by rais­ing our self-aware­ness in its den­sity to the high­est pos­si­ble state ever – by rais­ing our in­di­vid­ual self-aware­ness, by vir­tue of the mu­si­cal logic, to the state of our uni­ver­sal self – then we attain the deep­est depths of the mu­si­cal mean­ing: with our fac­ulty of know­ing we reach the in­fi­nite mu­si­cal force-field of the har­mony.

Here, in the world of the har­mony, lies the ab­so­lu­te field of true, im­me­di­ate cog­ni­tion in mu­sic.
Any fur­ther mu­si­cal cog­ni­tion, i.e. lo­cated fur­ther out­side, is of only me­diate na­ture to us.