Our long-time blogger David Canter considers what he has learned while completing his PhD in music composition. He spent a lifetime as a social scientist, requiring every argument to be bolstered by some form of empirical evidence, or at least a supportive citation from the works of others. The contrast of developing an approach to composing music that can be regarded as ‘a contribution to knowledge’, has made him aware that there are many ways of knowing which scientists, especially social scientists and psychologists, ignore at their peril.