Music and Semiotics: An Experiential Approach to Musical Sense-Making

Abstract

This chapter sketches recent evolutions of semiotics as applied to music. Rather than providing merely a historical overview, it focuses mainly on the pragmatic turn in semiotics and the role of sensory experience in the process of musical sense-making. In order to elaborate on this experience, it delves into theoretical groundings of second-order cybernetics, biosemiotics, and ecological psychology, which are then applied to the field of music. Much effort is made to provide a broader framework to illustrate the transition from a disembodied to an embodied approach to musical semiotics. Special emphasis is laid on the concept of affordance and the role of interactions with the sounds.

Experience as cognition: musical sense-making and the ‘in-time/ outside-of-time’ dichotomy

“…Dealing with music in a real-time listening situation entails a process-like approach to musical sense-making.This can be qualified as analysis-by-ear, as advocated already in the phenomenological approaches of the 1980s (Lochhead, 1986;Clifton, 1983), which argued for a dynamic and constructivist approach to music knowledge acquisition (Reybrouck, 2014(Reybrouck, , 2017a(Reybrouck, , 2017bReybrouck & Eerola, 2017). Central in this approach is the knowledge-by-acquaintance, as stressed already by pragmatic philosophers such as Dewey and James (see below).…”

“…What is needed also is an approach to musical understanding that revolves around the conception of 'music as heard' and 'music as apprehended', as stressed already by some phenomenological approaches in the 1980s (Lochhead, 1986;Clifton, 1983). Music, in this view, is something that has existential structure and meaning in the sense that our involvement MARK REYBROUCK with music is experienced rather than being merely reasoned and interpreted (Reybrouck, 2014(Reybrouck, , 2017a(Reybrouck, , 2017b. Or put differently, our experience is drastic rather than gnostic, to use Jankélévitch's terms (Jankélévitch, 2003; see also Abbate, 2004).…”

Perceptive vs reflective: spectator interpretation of multimodal artworks

“…This is not always an unintentional outcome of musical exploration as some scholars have made efforts to create what Morreale and colleagues defined as a "Rorschach interface" -an interpretively open system onto which spectators can project their own personal meaning [15]. The traditional approach to the analysis of semiotics and sense-making in music has predominantly focused on music's similarities to linguistics, and thus the syntactical and formal aspects of music have been held in the spotlight, though this approach lacks the capacity to describe a complete listening experience [16]. Further, music is also seen as a stimulus for motion, and so in this way, music is not only capable of communicating emotions and information, but is also capable of allowing listeners to enact visual and motive concepts, conveyed by and perceived in music [16].…”

“…The traditional approach to the analysis of semiotics and sense-making in music has predominantly focused on music's similarities to linguistics, and thus the syntactical and formal aspects of music have been held in the spotlight, though this approach lacks the capacity to describe a complete listening experience [16]. Further, music is also seen as a stimulus for motion, and so in this way, music is not only capable of communicating emotions and information, but is also capable of allowing listeners to enact visual and motive concepts, conveyed by and perceived in music [16]. As such, the interpretation of music varies between listeners, leading them to undertake unique processes of sense-making in order to interpret music.…”

Music as Epistemic Construct: From Sonic Experience to Musical Sense-Making

“…It is also closer to the real world which presents itself not in a segmented way but in continuous transitions. The continuous way of decoding, therefore, is most suitable for "exploring" and "perceiving", as advocated in the experiential approach to cognition [18]; the conceptual way, on the other hand, is more reductive in the sense that it constrains the real world from a relatively large and continuous set of stimuli to a finite set of discrete elements. This is a process of digitalization which takes a piece of information from a richer matrix of information in the sensory-analog representation to feature it with the exclusion of everything else.…”