Week 11: Meaning

Musical meaning has no consensus amongst philosophers of aesthetics.
Kivy (2002) – rejects the concept of ‘musical meaning’, category error. ‘Meaning’ is reserved for linguistics. Music has significance, logic, and expresses emotion.
VS
Jan-Jacques Nattiez – ‘meaning’ exists when it evokes another thought other than specific the object/event. Relational process.

Difficulty of musical translation - Impossible to assign a universal set of meanings to music. Unlike language, music cannot be translated without losing its meaning (Beethoven chamber piece translated to Javanese Gamelan ensemble). Meaning is directly associated with instrumentation, timbre, scale.
Cross-cultural appreciation of music (without translation)– purely sensual, contains familiar elements (sonic logic). Native listening remains different to cross-cultural listening.

Types of musical meaning:
1. Structural interconnection of musical elements – Expectations are important in creating meaning. “Gap-fill” (Meyer) is the expectation of successive pitches of a phrase. Expectations based on Gestalt properties and previous knowledge.
Embodied meaning / intramusical meaning
Approaches to musical aesthetics are either Absolutist (structure, not expression) or formalist (Hanslick-emotion is an extramusical issue)
2. The expression of emotion – expression of emotion by music (mood of music) vs. experience of emotion by listener (emotional reaction). Possible to identify the mood of the music without experiencing the emotion of the mood.
Cues affect perception of music e.g. tempo, pitch, timbre
3. The experience of emotion – Music can be used to regulate mood but does music evoke real everyday emotion, only an affective response, or emotions outside of everyday (Krumhansl study – physiological reactions and emotional reactions- aligned).
Chills are associated with violation of expectant harmonies (Sloboda) – not an everyday emotion (Zatorre identified region in brain responsible. Same as reward and motivation – dorsal midbrain)
4. Motion – tendency to synchronize with beat
5. Tone painting – environmental sounds, animal sounds, human sounds through music e.g. sighing
6. Musical topics – e.g. leitmotifs. Topics like dance forms, hunt music, pastoral.
7. Social associations – e.g. consumer behavior, ethnic associations.
8. Imagery and Narrative –
9. Association with life experience – recall of emotion from another time
10. Creating or transforming the self – music used for establishing/changing identity and use in trance.
11. Musical structure and cultural concepts – (may be unique to music)

Music and Semantics - how words reflect reality (like Kivy’s view on ‘musical meaning)
-Specific semantic contents is harder to establish that semantic concepts in music, unlike language.
-Leitmotifs (referential qualities)
-N400 tests (event-related potential of a word)

Music and Pragmatics – how listeners add contextual information to sentences and draw inferences about what is said
- Kehler’s theory (2002) that 3 broad types of connections exist between listener and utterances viz. resemblance (reasoning, categorizing events, corresponding between events), cause-effect (drawing a path of implications between events), and contiguity (understanding that events happen in a specific order).
- coherence between segments
-right hemisphere


Neural locations
Pleasantness vs. unpleasantness based on changing dissonances = righ hemisphere (right parahippocampal gyrus, orbitofrontal cortex)
Music expressing joy, happiness, sadness, fear = asymmetries between hemispheres (greater left frontal activity for positive emotions, greater right frontal activity for negative emotions).