Computations and interfaces: Some notes on the relation between the language and the music faculties

Abstract

Developments in linguistic theory over the last 20 years have led to a view of the different components of language as a whole that consists in a computational system whose syntactically structured output is interpreted by (mind internal) external systems. This paper suggests that music and language share the computational system and differ in the nature of external systems and the basic units of the lexicon of each system. Furthermore it is suggested that so-called formal meaning in music should be considered (along with syntactically created meaning in language) as nonconceptual representational content.