(vi) Intentions and emotions may be attributed at several levels (the source, the musical narrator, the musician), and we speculate on possible explanations of the special relation between music and emotions. (v) Aspects of musical syntax (notably Lerdahl and Jackendoff’s ‘time-span reductions’) might be derivable on semantic grounds from an event mereology (‘partology’), which also explains some cases in which tree structures are inadequate for music (overlap, ellipsis).
#Pure music definition series
In particular, a voice undergoing a musical movement m is true of an object undergoing a series of events e just in case there is a certain structure-preserving map between m and e. (iv) This makes it possible to define an inferential semantics but also a truth-conditional semantics for music. (iii) What is special about music semantics is that it aggregates inferences based on normal auditory cognition with further inferences drawn on the basis of the behavior of voices in tonal pitch space (through more or less stable positions, for instance). (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. Our framework has the following tenets: (i) Music cognition is continuous with normal auditory cognition. 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. The present bare-bone semantics of pure music proposes an explicit modelling of the affective response based on an algebraic meaning conception Relating pleasantness with consonance and surprise with entropic uncertainty leads to an account which directly relates structural and probabilistic aspects of tonal music with its affective content. The most important simplification is to assume that affective responses can be represented by a two-dimensional space of emotions, where one dimension refers to surprise and the other dimension refers to pleasantness. In order to get a concise account of the affective response, this paper makes several simplifications. As tonal music is organized by series of chords relative to the context of a tonal scale, the question is how music forms can be mapped onto aesthetic emotions. Using a term of Immanuel Kant, I propose to identify it with aesthetic emotion.
Taking the intrinsic content of music as basic, we have to ask about its nature. music that can be understood without reference to extrinsic sources. The latter conforms to pure (absolute) music, i.e. music that attempts to render an extra-musical narrative. The former is relevant in the case of program music, i.e.
Music can have an extrinsic and/or an intrinsic meaning.