 The ready-hearability theorist is at a slight advantage in accounting for our emotional responses to music’s expressiveness, since according to that theory one imagines that the music is a literal expression of emotion. This means that emotional responses to music’s expressiveness are no more puzzling than emotional responses to other imagined expressive agents, such as fictional characters in novels. The advantage is only slight because the question of how and why we respond emotionally to fictions is itself a philosophical problem of some magnitude. Nonetheless, there are several theories available (see entry on  imagination, section 5.3).  One difficulty with appealing to a solution to the paradox of fiction is that it is not clear that our emotional responses to the expressiveness of music are the same as those to emotionally expressive characters. For instance, the standard example of an emotional response to music is being made sad by a funeral march, while the standard example of emotional response to fiction is (something like) to feel pity for a sad character. If the former is to be explained in the same way as the latter, we would expect listeners to feel pity in response to the funeral march (pity for the persona imagined to be expressing herself through it). However, it seems reasonable to ask for more detailed examples since, on the one hand, we surely do feel sad (in some sense) in response to tragedy and, on the other, it is not obvious that we do not feel pity (or imagined pity, or whatever one’s preferred theory of emotional response to fiction posits) in response to tragic music.