BackgroundOne central problem of music psychology is to explain the nature and content of musical experience (Sloboda, 1998). Nowadays, music psychology funnels a number of questions about how human beings connect themselves with and within music that thinkers from all latitudes have put since ancient times (Deutsch, 2001). In this search, psychology has been nourished by systematic musicology. However, this disciplinary encounter is problematic when its findings are intended to be generalized due to the abyssal characteristics that both disciplines have shown since their origins (Dussel, 2014). The Abyssal Thinking (Santos, 2007) is developed when people define, unilaterally, radical lines that divide human experiences. Such lines make visible and valorize their own experiences, and make unintelligible and invisible the experiences at the other side of the line. Particularly, in music psychology, this thinking is mainly expressed while developing models based on an epistemic framework identified with the categories that Western music theory developed over centuries laying the foundations of the hegemonic musical thinking. This dominant episteme makes the nature of the subalternized cultures musical experience invisible (Shifres, 2017).AimsThis paper aims to explore some mechanisms by which the abyssal perspective in music psychology studies is consolidated. It intends to show how the dominant episteme misrepresent or directly obscure the nature of the musical experience of cultures that are subalternized.Main contributionTwo mechanisms of epistemological subalternization, commonly observed in studies in music psychology, are presented. On the one hand, the mythification mechanism (Martínez Garnica, 1985) produce observable realities based on theoretical categories generated a priori by the observer, which have the paradoxical effect of making the genuine prior realities invisible. Secondly, the concealment of the locus of enunciation (Grosfoguel, 2014), proposes a non-situated and omniscient researcher. Thus, the local character of the validity criteria of knowledge is misrepresented and universalized. Such a concealment also relegates other criteria and forms of knowledge that may be locally more relevant. Some examples from recent and classical research in music psychology are discussed according to both concepts.ImplicationsBoth presented mechanisms, when associated, reinforce coloniality of knowledge (Maldonado Torres, 2007) within the psychology of music. Within the framework of this granted coloniality, cross-cultural studies imply the impossibility of the Other for postulating his own theoretical categories and methodologies to answer their own questions (Zemelman, 2006). Through this form of epistemic racism (Maldonado Torres, 2014), the psychology of music runs the risk of collaborating with cognitive injustice, adopting an "extractive" perspective and denying the Other´s epistemic sovereignty (Santos, 2009).ReferencesSantos, B. de S. (2007). Beyond abyssal thinking. From global lines to ecologies of knowledges. Review, XXX (1), 41-89.Maldonado-Torres, N. (2007). On the Coloniality of Being: Contributions to the Development of a Concept. Cultural Studies, 21(2-3), 240-270.Grosfoguel, R. (2014). La descolonización de la economía política y los estudios poscoloniales: transmodernidad, pensamiento descolonial y colonialidad global. In B. de S. Santos & P. Meneses (Eds.), Epistemologías del Sur (Perspectivas) (pp. 373?405). Madrid: AKAL.