This is like where science was in discussing consciousness decades ago, when any and all observational claims about consciousness were dismissed as "fairy tale." More recently science has matured to where it has been widely recognized that at minimum observational claims should be correlated with neurological evidence (the "neural correlates of consciousness" approach). Neuroscience has come to realize that it must explain consciousness as we experience it, not just write off such experience as "fairy tale." Of course, there were a number of behaviorist-trained neuroscientists who wanted to keep consciousness as a "black box" to be left out of scientific explanation, who tried to silence those who rejected writing off conscious experience as some sort of illusion beneath the dignity of science.
Anyway, the approach over the last several decades is to work it from both sides. Francis Crick and Christof Kock published the foundational work on this approach 30 years ago. There's been much progress since. Reports from our experience of consciousness are not "extraordinary claims." This is an area of much remaining mystery, where we need to work from both sides, subjective as well as objective evidence and experimentation. That's the way science works now, concerning the capacities of consciousness. Seeing as we're all concerned with music here, which has no meaning outside of our consciousness of it, we need to design our experiments so as to meaningfully correlate with our observations of consciousness.
I get it that this forum is largely engineers and not neuroscientists. But we're talking about engineering musical equipment. The tests being reported here are immensely valuable, just as the experiments by consciousness-ignoring behaviorist psychologists were. There's yet more science to be done by taking reports from conscious experience seriously, as most modern neuroscientists do, and not base engineering claims on an outdated behaviorist paradigm.
