Abstract:We argue that a formal semantics for music can be developed, although it will be based on very different principles from linguistic semantics and will yield less precise inferences. Our framework has the following tenets: (i) Music cognition is continuous with normal auditory cognition. (ii) In both cases, the semantic content derived from an auditory percept can be identified with the set of inferences it licenses on its causal sources, analyzed in appropriately abstract ways (e.g. as 'voices' in some Western… Show more
“…Following Meyer (1956), one view, the “absolutist,” states that “musical meaning lies exclusively within the context of the work itself,” whereas the other one, the “referentialist,” asserts that “music also communicates meanings which in some way refer to the extramusical world of concepts, actions, emotional states, and character.” Meyer also talks about “embodied” and “designative” meanings. This author mainly focuses on the former aspect, while the latter view lies at the heart of the work of Schlenker (2016). As we have shown, musical pieces (and musical phrases) typically end with a decrease in both information and tempo.…”
Section: Discussionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…As we have shown, musical pieces (and musical phrases) typically end with a decrease in both information and tempo. This slowdown has been repeatedly interpreted as resulting from the association of music with a (possibly virtual) source that loses energy, thus decelerating (Desain & Honing, 1996; Schlenker, 2016; Sundberg & Verrillo, 1980). This phenomenon operates in addition to the positive relationship between information and duration that directly follows the efficient communication principle, which is only concerned with close internal connections that arise from the specific organization of the musical material itself.…”
Since its inception, Shannon's information theory has attracted interest for the study of language and music. Recently, a wide range of converging studies have shown how efficient communication pervades language, from phonetics to syntax. Efficient principles imply that more resources should be assigned to highly informative items. For instance, average information content was shown to be a better predictor of word length than frequency, revisiting the famous Zipf's law. However, in spite of the success of the efficient communication framework in the study of language and speech, very little work has investigated its relevance in the analysis of music. Here, we examine the organization of harmonic information in two large corpora of Western music, one made of MIDI files directly sequenced from scores, and the other made of MIDI recordings of live performances of highly skilled piano players. We show that there is a clear positive relationship between (contextual) information content of harmonic sequences and two essential musical properties, namely duration and loudness: the more unexpected a harmonic event is, the longer and the louder it is.
“…Following Meyer (1956), one view, the “absolutist,” states that “musical meaning lies exclusively within the context of the work itself,” whereas the other one, the “referentialist,” asserts that “music also communicates meanings which in some way refer to the extramusical world of concepts, actions, emotional states, and character.” Meyer also talks about “embodied” and “designative” meanings. This author mainly focuses on the former aspect, while the latter view lies at the heart of the work of Schlenker (2016). As we have shown, musical pieces (and musical phrases) typically end with a decrease in both information and tempo.…”
Section: Discussionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…As we have shown, musical pieces (and musical phrases) typically end with a decrease in both information and tempo. This slowdown has been repeatedly interpreted as resulting from the association of music with a (possibly virtual) source that loses energy, thus decelerating (Desain & Honing, 1996; Schlenker, 2016; Sundberg & Verrillo, 1980). This phenomenon operates in addition to the positive relationship between information and duration that directly follows the efficient communication principle, which is only concerned with close internal connections that arise from the specific organization of the musical material itself.…”
Since its inception, Shannon's information theory has attracted interest for the study of language and music. Recently, a wide range of converging studies have shown how efficient communication pervades language, from phonetics to syntax. Efficient principles imply that more resources should be assigned to highly informative items. For instance, average information content was shown to be a better predictor of word length than frequency, revisiting the famous Zipf's law. However, in spite of the success of the efficient communication framework in the study of language and speech, very little work has investigated its relevance in the analysis of music. Here, we examine the organization of harmonic information in two large corpora of Western music, one made of MIDI files directly sequenced from scores, and the other made of MIDI recordings of live performances of highly skilled piano players. We show that there is a clear positive relationship between (contextual) information content of harmonic sequences and two essential musical properties, namely duration and loudness: the more unexpected a harmonic event is, the longer and the louder it is.
“…Following in part insights in Bregman , the meaning of music has been argued instead to lie in inferences about ‘virtual’ sources of the music (Schlenker , ): not the musicians, but virtual objects that satisfy certain inferences triggered by the music. As we will see, in recent proposals these virtual sources need not be sound‐producing, which allows music to evoke extremely diverse scenes and objects (albeit in a highly abstract, underspecified fashion).…”
Section: Beyond Language Ii: Music and Dance Semanticsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…They are of two kinds: some are lifted from normal auditory cognition; others derive from specifically musical properties of tonal pitch space. An illustration is given in Schlenker : Both kinds of inferences can be used to signal the end of a piece. One common way to signal the end is to gradually decrease the loudness and/or the speed.…”
Section: Beyond Language Ii: Music and Dance Semanticsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…In our analysis of the iconic component of ASL GROW in (5), we stated two preservation requirements: the larger the sign, the greater the growth; the faster the sign, the quicker the growth. Schlenker , defines a (weak) music semantics based on formally similar preservation requirements. A toy example is discussed in which two properties are taken into account: loudness, with the requirement that lower loudness is interpreted in terms of lower energy of the source, or greater distance of the source from the perspectival point; and harmonic stability, with the requirement that less harmonically stable chords denote less physically stable events.…”
Section: Beyond Language Ii: Music and Dance Semanticsmentioning
Formal semantics was born from an attempt to state explicit rules to predict the truth conditions of natural language sentences. But this goal can be extended beyond language stricto sensu, to a variety of representational systems in nature. This was part of the program of semiotics (e.g. Morris 1938), construed as a general theory of signs; but it never got integrated to the research program of formal semantics. We argue for such an integration, on two general grounds. First, the class of objects that interact with or display uncontroversially linguistic properties is larger than was initially thought. Spoken and especially sign language make use of rich iconic resources which interact with logical structure but cannot be captured without a 'formal semantics with iconicity'. In addition, recent comparisons between sign, speech and gestures strongly suggest that language is multi-modal and that gestures are full citizens of the linguistic world: they trigger familiar inferential types (presuppositions or supplements) when they co-occur with or follow words; and when they fully replace words, their informational content gets divided among familiar slots of the inferential typology, and they even follow a 'gestural grammar' that is in part reminiscent of sign language grammar. Second, independently from these language-internal motivations, the proposed extension leads to a far broader typology of meaning operations in nature, one that includes animal meanings, pictorial meanings, musical meanings, and more.
As part of a recent attempt to extend the methods of formal semantics beyond language ('Super Semantics'), it has been claimed that music has an abstract truth-conditional semantics, albeit one that has more in common with iconic semantics than with standard compositional semantics (Schlenker 2017(Schlenker , 2019a. After summarizing this approach and addressing a common objection (here due to Leonard Bernstein), we argue that music semantics should be enriched in three directions by incorporating insights of other areas of Super Semantics. First, it has been claimed by Abusch 2013 that visual narratives make use of discourse referents akin to those we find in language. We argue that a similar conclusion extends to music, and we highlight it by investigating ways in which orchestration and dance may make cross-referential dependencies more explicit. Second, we show that by bringing music semantics closer to the semantics of visual narratives, we can give an account of the semantics of mixed visual and musical sequences. Third, it has been claimed that co-speech gestures trigger characteristic conditionalized presuppositions, called 'cosuppositions', and that their semantic status derives from their parasitic character relative to words (Schlenker 2018a,b). We argue that the same conclusion extends to some instances of film and cartoon music: it may trigger cosuppositions that can be revealed by embedding film excerpts or gifs in sentences so as to test presupposition projection. We further argue that under special discourse conditions (pertaining to certain Questions under Discussion), pro-speech gestures and pro-speech music alike can trigger cosuppositions as well. These results suggest that new insights can be gained not just by extending the methods of semantics to new objects, but also by drawing new connections among them.
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