Does Music Mean Anything ?

Abstract

A received view in music psychology is that to have assigned to a piece of music a certain kind of structural description (in which elements are marked as more or less prominent, or more or less related to one another) is to have understood it. Yet this view is open to the “Searlean” criticism that it has ignored the essential elements of human understanding of music, namely, the dynamic feelings of tension and resolution, anticipation, growth and decay, which the music engenders when experienced as structure. It is argued that these feelings are plausible candidates for the basic elements of a musical semantics. Such feelings are not emotions as commonly understood, although they may engender emotions in some circumstances. The characteristics of music which engender these feelings are similar (or analogous) to characteristics of the experienced physical and biological world, particularly of objects in motion (or agents in action). Thus, in some circumstances, combinations of these elemental feelings can give rise to the sense that music has “personality” or “atmosphere”. Some psychological research investigating structural concomitants of dynamic feelings is discussed.