Plato’s Timaeus suggests two types of responses to consonances: the perception of consonance results in pleasure (ἡδονή) for fools, but delight (εὐφροσύνη) for the intelligent (80b5-8). By investigating the physical and psychological mechanisms of perception and hearing in the Timaeus, this paper argues that the pleasure and pain taken in auditory perception operate analogously to the pleasure and pain of other sensory modalities. Accordingly, the fools’ pleasure is (merely)a non-localized aesthetic pleasure of the mortal soul. Nevertheless, aesthesis of sounding material must be present to the intelligent individual in order for delight to arise: delight results from the correct perception of a sensory object as a mimesis of divine order. [http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/10.1163/22129758-12341278;jsessionid=7s9tahtn2kks6.x-brill-live-02]