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With the intention of stripping away those presuppositions, I, as well as a number of musical theorists, have turned to semiotics. The advantage of “semiotic” analysis is that signs are not defined by their function or position. Signs are simply classified as “familiar” or “unfamiliar”.
- Douglas Worthen
- 2010
Musical semiotics begins from the premise that music is a signifying phenomenon. However, the field itself has developed according to two distinct paths. The first one starts by considering music and its history.
Searches related to what does music mean in semiotic terms pdf format template
The role of semiotic aspects in musicology is best described from the complex onto- logical topography of music. We start this article from the fundamental description [70], stating that “music is communication, has meaning and mediates on the physical level between its mental and psychic levels”.
traditional format called “The Un-Master Class®” (UMC) which has become a potent tool in his practice-based research (Tommasini, 1997).1 When Westney and Grund began collaborating in 2008, she recognized in his insights an incipient philosophy of intention that dovetailed with work she had been doing for years 1.
- Introduction to version 3
- Which word(s) to use?
- Peirce’s basic sign typology
- ‘Symbol’ and ‘sign’: Saussure and Peirce
- Denotation and connotation
- Semiosis
- Codal incompetence
- What is ‘music’?
- Hierarchies of 'music'
- Six general tenets about musical communication
- Musical signification
- Genre synecdoche
- General aspects of communication
- Simultaneous paramusical forms of cultural expression
- OF ’Music’s Meanings’
- SEE CHAPTER 7 IN ’Music’s Meanings’
- OF ’Music’s Meanings’
- IOCM PMFA
This text was part of an ongoing project to produce a textbook in the semiotics of music. Although this text was used by music students, it was also written with students from other humanities and social science disciplines in mind. For this reason, the text con-tains no musical notation and uses a minimum of unexplained musicological terminol-ogy....
Native speakers of French tend to use sémiologie while Anglophones and Italians seem to prefer ‘semiotics’ when referring to the systematic study of sign systems. As can be seen from the preceding paragraphs, all three words can mean basically the same thing. This confusion is likely to be resolved in a similar fashion to the VHS versus Betamax bat...
Icon Icons are signs bearing physical resemblance to what they represent. Such resemblance can be striking, e.g. photograph, (traditional) painting, but maps and certain types of diagram are also iconic because there is structural resemblance (though not striking) between them and what they purport to represent. The representation of rising and fal...
Whereas the Peircean term ‘symbol’ means signs whose connection to what they rep-resent is neither homologous9 (icons) nor causal (indices) but rather conventional or ar-bitrary, ‘symbol’ in Saussurean discourse has more or less the same meaning as ‘sign’ for Peirce. This means that whereas a French semioligist might qualify music as a ‘sym-bolic s...
The word ‘fire’ denotes the object / phenomenon fire. Fires can be quite different but whether it’s an oil refinery conflagration or a tiny Primus stove, it’s still a fire. In other languages, matches or cigarettes burning would also be denoted as feu, fuoco, fuego, fogo, eld, vuur, Feur, etc. (i.e. ‘fire’), whereas English is probably alone in cal...
In A System of Logic Peirce distinguished between, on the one hand, dynamic or me-chanical action and, on the other, sign action. The latter he called semiosis. It basically means the actions and processes by which signs are constructed and transformed, i.e. how signs acquire and change their meaning. Semiosis is a neglected and misunder-stood area...
Codal incompetence in music arises when transmitter and receiver do not share the same vocabulary of musical symbols. For instance, having lived in Sweden for many years, I connote a certain cheery accor-dion style with a certain type of old-time proletarian fun and games (gammaldans). If I were to mix a bit of that style into a signature tune for ...
Many peoples have no word equivalent to whatever we seem to mean by ‘music’. For example, the Tiv people of West Africa (Keil 1977) and the Ewe of Togo and Eastern Ghana do not seem to have had much need to single out music as a phenomenon need-ing verbal denotation. Actually, this is not entirely true, because the Ewe do use the English word ‘musi...
I have already quoted Saint Augustine’s fear of music’s seductive forces. An asceticism similar to that of orthodox Islam emerged also within Christianity. By the eleventh cen-tury a hierarchy of musics had evolved consisting of musica mundana (the music of the heavens, i.e. the spheres of the universe), musica humana (music providing equilibrium o...
1. ‘Music’ defined Music is that form of interhuman communication which distinguishes itself from oth-ers in that individually and collectively experienced affective / gestural (bodily) states and processes are conceived and transmitted as humanly organised nonverbal sound structures to those creating these sounds themselves and / or to others who ...
Musical structures and parameters If, as we have suggested, music is related to something other than itself, how do such relationships work? To answer this question, it is first necessary to identify music’s sig-nifiers and then to try and determine what those signifiers signify. This task begs in its turn any number of basic methodological questio...
Part for whole The second main category of musical signs is the genre synecdoche. In verbal language, a synecdoche denotes a figure of speech in which a part substitutes the whole, as in the expression ‘all hands on deck’. Although, at least from the captain’s view, the sailors’ brawn is worth more than their brain, the sailors’ hands on deck would...
Who is transmitter and who is receiver? What is the physical nature of the channel and where does reception of the music take place? What social relationship exists between transmitter(s) and receiver(s) of a particu-lar piece of music (a) in general (b) at the particular occasion of musical communi-cation? What interest and motivation do(es) the r...
Paramusical sound, e.g. church bells, background chatter, rattling crockery, applause, engine hum, birdsong, sound effects. Oral language, e.g. monologue, dialogue, commentary, voice-over, lyrics, etc. Written language, e.g. programme or liner notes, advertising material, title credits, subtitles, written devices on stage, expression marks and othe...
An account of your own reactions to a piece of music can be called ‘intuitive’, ‘intro-spective’ or ‘intrasubjective’. For reasons too complex to account for here, arts academe, from literary criticism to musical ‘analysis’, seems to revel in this approach, while it is quite unacceptable in social and natural science contexts. This contradiction of...
If you think that a particular museme (or set of musemes) is particularly operative in creating particular connotations in the music you are analysing, you can always test your theory by means of commutation or hypothetical substitution. You just replace whatever structural element you think is semiotically important in creating the conno-tations i...
Melody Since at least 1600 and until the advent of rave dance music (especially techno), the ba-sic compositional paradigm of most European and North American music has been the melody-accompaniment dualism. It is what Haydn and AC/DC share in common, so to speak. It is by no means a universal phenomenon. Most West African traditional mu-sic, for i...
objective states of correspondence demonstrable states of correspondence Fig. 4: Methodological paradigm for analysis of affect in popular music.56. SCFS Sociocultural field of study Access problem: select method and ma-terial Emitter – interests, needs and aims musicν comments on aims Emitter – interests, needs and functions Musical ‘channel’ Rece...
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I propose a cognitive-semiotic approach to the analysis of the meaning evoked by music listening, adopting a framework that eludes disciplinary limitations and expands the notion of meaning to the phenomenological concept of intentionality.
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Dec 1, 2005 · After a brief survey of music semiotic developments in the United States, I present four interrelated approaches based on my own work. Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness,...
