Tenet 1. Concerted simultaneity and collective identity

• Musical communication can take place between:
• an individual and himself/herself;
• two individuals;
• individuals within the same group;
• an individual and a group;
• a group and an individual;
• members of one group and those of another.
• Particularly musical (and choreographic) types of communication are those involving a concerted simultaneity of sound events or movements, that is, between a group and its members, between a group and an individual or between two groups. While you can sing, play, dance, talk, paint, sculpt and write to or for yourself and for others, it is very rare for several people to simultaneously talk, write, paint or sculpt in time with each other. In fact, as soon as speech is subordinated to temporal organisation of its prosodic elements it becomes intrinsically musical, as is evident from the choral character of rhythmically chanted slogans in street demonstrations or in the role of the choir in Ancient Greek drama. Thanks to this factor of concerted simultaneity, music and dance are particularly suited to expressing collective messages of affective and corporeal identity of individuals in relation to themselves, to each other, and to their social, as well as physical, surroundings.16

Tenet 2. Intra- and extrageneric

• Direct imitations of, or reference to, sound outside the framework of musical discourse are relatively uncommon elements in most Western musics.17 In fact, musical structures often seem to be objectively related to either: [a] their occurrence in similar guise in other music; or [b] their own context within the piece of music in which they (already) occur. At the same time, it is silly to treat music as a self-contained system of sound combinations because changes in musical style are often found in conjunction with (accompanying, preceding, following) change in the society and culture of which the music is part.
• The contradiction between music only refers to music (the intrageneric notion) and music is related to society (extrageneric) is non-antagonistic. A recurrent symptom observed when studying how musics vary inside society and from one society to another in time or place is the way in which new means of musical expression are incorporated into the main body of any given musical tradition from outside the framework of its own discourse. These `intonation crises'18 work in a number of different ways. They can:
• refer to other musical codes, by acting as social connotors of what sort of people use those `other' sounds in which situations, for example an `ethnic' flute in the middle of a piece of mainstream pop or a `pastoral' drone inserted into a Baroque oratorio;19
• reflect changes in sound technology, acoustic conditions, or the soundscape, as well as changes in collective self-perception accompanying these developments, for example, from clavichord to grand piano, from bagpipe to accordion, from rural to urban blues, from rock music to techno pop;
• reflect fluctuations in class structure or other notable demographic change, such as reggae influences on British rock; or the shift in dominance of US popular music (1930s - 1960s) from Broadway shows to the more rock-, blues- and country-based styles from the US South and West;
• act as a combination of any of the three processes just mentioned.

Tenet 3. Musical universals

• Cross-cultural universals of musical code are bio-acoustic. While such relationships between musical sound and the human body are at the physical basis of all music, the majority of musical communication is nevertheless culturally specific. The basic bio-acoustic universals of music can be summarised in the following four relationships:
• between [a] the rate[s] at which notes or groups of notes are presented (pulse, surface rate, accentuations etc.) and [b] rates of heartbeat (pulse) or breathing, or footsteps when walking or running, or other bodily movement (shaking, shivering, waving, pulling, pushing, etc.). Put simply, no-one can musically relax in a hurry, stand still while running and so on;20
• between [a] musical loudness and timbre (attack, envelope, decay, transients) and [b] certain types of physical activity. This means no-one can make gentle or `caressing' kinds of musical statement by striking hard objects sharply and that it is counterproductive to yell jerky lullabies at breakneck speed. Conversely, no-one is likely to use smooth phrasing or soft timbres for hunting or war situations because those involved will be too relaxed to do their job;21
• between [a] speed and loudness of tone beats and [b] the acoustic setting. This means that quick, quiet tone beats are indiscernible if there is a lot of reverberation and that slow, long, loud ones are difficult to sustain if there is little or no reverberation. This is one reason why a dance or pub rock band brings its own adjustable acoustic space, in the form of echo and reverb units, to venues where carpets and clothes absorb the sounds the band produces.
• between [a] musical phrase lengths and [b] the capacity of the human lung. This means that few people can sing or blow and breathe in at the same time. It also implies that musical phrases tend to last between two and ten seconds.22
• The general areas of connotation just mentioned (acoustic situation, movement, speed, energy and non-musical sound) are all in a bio-acoustic relationship to the various musical parameters with which they are associated (pulse, volume, phrase duration, timbre, etc.). These relationships may well be cross-cultural, but that does not mean that evaluation of such phenomena as large spaces (cold and lonely versus free and open), hunting (exhilarating versus cruel), hurrying (exciting versus stressful) will also be the same even inside one and the same culture, let alone between cultures. One reason for such discrepancy is that the musical parameters mentioned in the list of `universals' (pulse, volume, general phrase duration and certain aspects of timbre and pitch) do not include the way in which rhythmic, metric, timbral, tonal, melodic, instrumentational or harmonic parameters are organised in relation to each other inside the musical discourse. Such musical organisation presupposes some sort of social organisation and cultural context before it can be created, understood or otherwise invested with meaning. In other words, only very general bio-acoustic types of connotation can be considered as cross-cultural universals of music. Therefore, even if musical and linguistic boundaries do not necessarily coincide, it is fallacious to regard music as a universal language.
• To clarify this essential point about music's cultural specificity, it is worth mentioning a little experiment I conducted at a symposium on cross-cultural communication.23 I informed thirteen participants, all working in the sphere of immigrant cultures, that they would hear eight short examples of music which were `all connected to one and the same thing: an important event in any culture and something which happens to every human being'. The participants were asked to guess what the common denominator might be and, if they could not think of anything, to jot down on a piece of paper whatever mood, type of action, behaviour, images or thoughts they felt the music communicated to them. All eight examples, each taken from a different `non-Western' music tradition, were connected with death , a universal phenomenon if ever there was because, with the exception of mass casualties in wars, natural disasters etc., the death of virtually every human is marked by some form of ritual in all cultures. Did the thirteen cross-cultural experts manage to spot death in the music they heard?
• Despite the obvious initial hint (`an important event in any culture and something that happens to every human being'), not a single respondent associated death or anything death-related (wake, funeral, mourning etc.) with any of the eight death-related music examples. True, connotations like complaint, wailing, sadness, serious and suffering occurred in response to two of eight extracts, but the most common descriptions of all the examples had to do with either [1] energetic action or excitement, for example work, war, fighting, hunting, agitation, dancing, adventure, gymnastics; or [2] happiness and celebration , including joy, confidence, feasting, abandon, contentment etc. There was even some love and tenderness as well as one wedding . More significant is perhaps that eleven of the thirteen respondents tried to identify the cultural origin of the music: there were two Africa s (plus one jungle ), two Arab s (plus one each for bazaar, desert, camels and Yemen ), as well as one each for China, Greece, India and Turkey . Clearly, the examples presenting music for funerals, burials, etc. were considered foreign and associated with a variety of moods and events, the vast majority of which have no discernible link with anything `death-like' in contemporary urban Western culture.24

Conceptual comparisons

• Another way of understanding the Western concept of music is to compare it to different but related concepts in other cultures. Although no human society of which we have any knowledge has ever been without music in the sense defined on page See In this book, `music' will be understood as that form of interhuman communication in which humanly organised non-verbal sound can, following culturally specific conventions, carry meaning relating to emotional, gestural, tactile, kinetic, spatial and prosodic patterns of cognition., the concept of music is by no means universal. For example, the Tiv nation of West Africa (Keil 1977) and the Ewe of Togo and Eastern Ghana do not appear to have found it necessary to single out music as a phenomenon requiring a special word any more than the British have needed different words for the three basic types of snow that the Inuktitut language conceptually refines into several subcategories. 25 To be fair, the Ewe do actually use the English word `music', but only as an untranslated loan word to denote foreign phenomena like singing church hymns or listening to the radio. The music they make themselves in traditional village life has no equivalent label in the Ewe language. According to Ghanaian musicologist, Klevor Abo:

`Vù really means `drum' and há is the word for club or association. A vù há is the club you belong to in the village... Voice is called bá, so singing is vù bá. Vù is used to signify the whole performance or occasion: the music, singing, drums, drama and so on.'26

• Having no exact verbal equivalent to our `music' clearly does not mean that the culture in question is without music any more than the English language's lack of verbal equivalent to the Hindi notion of rasa or to the German notion of Weltanschauung means that Anglophones cannot conceive of different types of feeling/mood/state-of-mind (rasa) or of different ways of looking at the world (Weltanschauung). Nor is a lack of equivalent to our word music connected to village communities in West Africa because the Japanese, with their long-standing traditions of music and theatre in official religion and at feudal courts, did not feel obliged to invent a word equivalent to the European concept of `music' until the nineteenth century. The Japanese translated `music' as ongaku (
), on ( ) meaning sound and gaku ( ) enjoyment, i.e. sounds performed for listening enjoyment or entertainment.27

• In other words, neither the Japanese nor the Ewe needed a word for what we mean by music until confronted by us Europeans and our culture. It must have been strange to come across people like us who treated what we call music as if it could exist independently of a larger whole (drama, poetry, singing, dancing, ritual, etc.), and the Japanese went straight to the heart of the matter with the word ongaku, identifying the European notion of music as referring to the non-verbal sounding bits of what they themselves considered as part of a larger set of symbolic practices. The Ewe reacted similarly, using the untranslated English colonial word music to label European music which was not an integral part of their own traditional culture and which we Europeans conceptualise as distinct from other related cultural practices.28

Both the Ewe (vù) and Japanese (gaku) concepts resemble to some extent that of the ancient Greeks whose term technê mousikê ( texnh mousikÆ or mousikê for short) originally referred to the skills of all the muses: drama, poetry, dancing, etc., not just to playing instruments or singing. The musica of ancient Rome seems to have covered a similar semantic field. However, during the Hellenic merchant period, there seems to have been a shift in the meaning of Greek mousikê and Latin musica in learned circles, so that Saint Augustine (d. 430), worrying about the seductive dangers of music, seems to use `music' (musica) in our contemporary sense of the word.29

• It seems likely that this more restricted use of mousikê and musica prevailed amongst scholars and clerics in Europe from the fifth century onwards.30 Moreover, Arab scholars between the eighth and thirteenth centuries appropriated the Greek word mousikê (as al musiqi) to refer to what we mean by `instrumental music' today, not to the gamut of artistic expressions denoted by the mousikê of Plato or Aristotle.31 It should also be noted that Mohammed is said to have shown interest in music and that the Koran itself contains no directly negative pronouncements against music. However, orthodox clerics of Islam were later to warn, like St. Augustine, against the evils of music, the main controversy being whether the Prophet's judgement of `poets', including musicians, in the Koran's 26th sura referred to music connected to infidel rites or to music in general.32 The main point is that influential ascetic patriarchs of Mediterranean and Middle-Eastern monotheism were worried about the sensual power of the non-verbal aspect of sonic expression and that they needed a concept to isolate and identify it.
• What happens to `music' in the vernacular languages of Western and Central Europe before the twelfth century is anybody's guess. Perhaps, like old Norse or modern Icelandic, there was a blanket term covering what bards, narrators of epic poetry and minstrels all did.33 Certainly, the Northern French trouvères and the Provençal troubadours of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries were not only known as singers, players and tunesmiths ( trouver / trobar = find, invent, compose) but also as jugglers and poets.
• Music enters the English language in the thirteenth century via old French, whose musique appears about a century earlier.34 The arrival of the word in the vernacular of both nations denotes more or less what we mean by music today. It also coincides with the granting of charters to merchant boroughs and with the establishment of the first universities. Unfortunately, there is hardly enough evidence to support the idea that the crystallisation of the term music connects ideologically with the ascendancy of a merchant class, even though the Hellenic period, Arab mercantile hegemony in the Mediterranean, and ascendancy of the European bourgeoisie, all seem to feature the new concept. Whatever the case, the European ruling classes were able to use the word music in its current meaning well before the eighteenth century: the semiotic field had been prepared by clerics and ecclesiastical theorists who had, by the eleventh century, established a metaphysical pecking order of musics. This type of hierarchy is, as we shall see the later (p. See Articles of faith, ff.), important to the development of the Romantic notions, cited at the start of this chapter, of music's supposedly transcendental qualities.
• These brief cross-cultural and historical observations about the word music indicate that the concept denotes particular sets of non-verbal sound produced by humans and associated with certain other forms of symbolic representation, sounds which relate enough to physical and emotional aspects of human experience to be considered disconcerting by ascetic clerics. The question is: which `sets of humanly produced sounds' relate to which other forms of symbolic representation? One answer to that question is provided by theories of human evolution.

Animal music?

• The oldest musical instrument discovered to date is a flute made from the femur of the now extinct European bear and found in a Neanderthal burial site in today's Slovenia. The flute, unearthed in 1995, is between 45,000 and 84,000 years old.35 Although (to split the difference) 64,000 years may sound like a long time ago, it is the mere twinkling of an eye in terms of the evolution of our species: the earliest hominid forms evolved from the higher primates at least 3 million years ago.36
• Evolutionist theories of music explain its origins in terms of evolutionary adaptation, by which is meant the ability of a species to find effective strategies for survival by means of adapting to their environment. One rather unlikely theory is that music derives from the synchronous chorusing of higher primates, while another argues more plausibly that `it is in the evolution of affiliative interactions between mothers and infants that we can discover the origins of the competencies and sensitivities that gave rise to human music.'37
• Several other theories stress the importance of what Brown (2000) calls `musilanguage', i.e. that language and music, both sonic and both neurologically intertwined, stem from a common origin, `evolving together as brain size increased during the last two million years in the genus homo' (Falk 2000). Like the mother-and-infant theory, this explanation also seems quite plausible because both Homo sapiens and neanderthalensis had, if our knowledge of the Slovenian bone flute and other early human instruments of music are anything to go by,38 clearly started to treat oral language and music as distinct modes of sonic communication. Although neurologically interrelated, these two sonic systems were used for different functions. This aspect of evolution is important because the separation of music from language is often seen, rightly or wrongly, as a trait distinguishing humans from other animals.

One common objection to the theory of distinction between music and language as a basis for understanding the origins of music as trait of human behaviour argues that if we, as humans, say that birds and whales sing, then we are talking about music, simply because that is how we hear it. The sonic habits of humpback whales provide fuel for this argument. As those great mammals migrate or swim around their breeding grounds, they piece together repeated phrases, singing song after song for up to twenty-four hours at a stretch. Humpback whales have a seven-octave range similar to that covered by the piano keyboard, i.e. a range of fundamental frequencies within the limits of what humans can hear, and much larger than the restricted range of pitches the human voice can produce. As the months go by, whales modify their song patterns and most males end up singing the same new song after a while. Moreover, humpback whale song contain rhythms and phrases which, strung together, build forms of a length comparable to ballads or symphonic movements. It also seems that their songs contain recurrent formulae which end off different phrases in much the same way as we use rhyme in poetry. One theory about rhymes in whale song is that they help in the breeding season when the males have to remember `what comes next': the more elaborate the whale's song pattern, the more likely it is to rhyme.39

All these traits of whale song come across as typically musical to the human ear. But the `music' of the animal kingdom does not stop there: certain insects produce distinct rhythmic patterns which, like those of human music, vary and repeat in longer patterns. Moreover, eleven percent of primate species can produce short strings of notes that, though less musical to our ears than the songs of humpback whales, form a recognisable pattern in time. This behavioural trait, characteristic for most of our own music, is thought to have evolved independently four times within primates. Such evidence suggests that music is not exclusive to the human species.

• One problem with the objections just raised is that they are anthropomorphic in that they interpret non-human behaviour on the basis of human experience, perception and behaviour. The animals make music standpoint assumes, in other words, that the whales, insects and primates just mentioned hear and react to the sounds they make themselves in the same way that we hear and react to them; it also assumes that animals produce those patterns of sound for the same reasons as we make what we hear as comparable patterns of sound in our music.40 For example, although we hear birds as the greatest songsters of the animal kingdom, they do not necessarily make, hear and use their melodies as we make, hear and use our music. Ornithologist Eugene Morton puts it this way:

`Any analogy to human music is not interesting to me. It doesn't explain anything about how the world is, except how humans want to perceive it. Good on 'em, but I want to understand animals... Birdsong constitutes an avian broadcasting network, letting birds minimise the arduous work of flying about during interactions'.41

• If singing can replace the amount of flying around birds would otherwise have to do, it is certainly part of a symbolic system. Instead of physically repelling every potential invader of its own space, a bird can claim its territory by making sounds we call birdsong. Instead of flying round to see if local members of the family are all there before they shut down for the night and that they are all there again in the morning, an individual bird can join in the evening and dawn choruses. Birdsong is in other words a strategy for the survival of individuals within the group, because they all have to have a place to nest, and for the group as a whole, because they may all need to collect for foraging or migration. It seems that singing is just an energy-efficient way for birds to establish these relations essential to their survival.
• It would in a similar way be unrealistic to expect whales, who have to cover huge distances in search of food but reconvene for breeding, to keep visual or tactile underwater checks on the whereabouts of each other, as individuals or as family groups, across vast stretches of ocean. In this sense, whale song, by replacing tactile and visual contact with sonic communication, also acts symbolically to facilitate the social cohesion necessary for the survival of their species. It is also highly probable that the various functions of sonic communication in the animal kingdom are linked with what we humans might qualify as pleasure and pain, tension and relaxation, etc., i.e. with what we think of as emotions and which are essential ingredients in the evolutionary process of most sentient beings.42 If such `emotions' are linked to situations in the animal kingdom where what we hear as their `music' is used to signal messages we might understand verbally in terms like get off my property! or it's OK, we're all here , then it is also probable that the sounds in question are accompanied by patterns of hormone production comparable to those found in humans when stimulated in certain ways by certain sounds in certain situations.43
• If there is any truth in the line of reasoning just presented, it would seem that there may be grounds for calling that animal `music' music. After all, such an argument would go, what we have described tallies quite well with the seventh of our eight axioms about music ( p. See If music involves the human organisation and perception of non-verbal sound (points 1-6, above), and if it is closely associated with touch, gesture, movement and prosodic aspects of speech, it is close to preverbal modes of sensory perception and, consequently, to the mediation of somatic (corporeal) and affective (emotional) aspects of human cognition.), with our observations about `concerted simultaneity and collective identity' ( p. See Tenet 1. Concerted simultaneity and collective identity), and with several other points mentioned under our working definition of music.

Whether or not zoomusicologists can demonstrate a separation between music and other forms of sonic communication produced by non-human animals, the point here is that we humans seem to have done so for at least 100,000 years. One sound-based symbolic system (language) is more suited, though not wholly dedicated, to the denotation of objects and ideas, while the other (music) is more closely, though not entirely, linked to movement, gesture, touch and emotion (see axiom 4, p. See Like the spoken word, music is mediated as sound but, unlike speech, music's sounds do not need to include words, even though one of the most common forms of music making entails the singing, chanting or reciting of words. Another way of understanding the distinction is to remember that while the prosodic, or `musical' aspects of speech --tonal, timbral, durational and metric elements such as inflexion, intonation, accentuation, timbre, speed of delivery, timing, periodicity, etc.,-- are all important to the communication of the spoken word, a wordless utterance consisting only of prosodic elements ceases by definition to be speech because it has no words: it is most likely to be understood as music.). As stated earlier, language and music, both neurologically intertwined and both using the sense of hearing, seem to stem from a common origin, evolving together as brain size increased during the last two million years of evolution in the genus homo. However, even though the oldest musical instrument found so far may be from a Neanderthal burial site, it is after we humans managed, some 50,000 years ago, to wipe out our Neanderthal cousins that we start to leave significant numbers of complex sonic objects behind us.44

• To summarise: the separation of sonic representation into two distinct but related spheres of activity --language and music-- may have started to evolve in our hominid ancestors but seems to have developed dramatically after their demise. Cross (1999) goes as far as to suggest that this distinction between language and music may be the most important thing humans ever did. We will return to this point after the next section which deals with music's importance for another fundamental aspect of human development.

Music and socialisation

• At the age of minus four months most humans start to hear. By the time we enter this world and long before we can focus our eyes on objects at different distances from ourselves, our aural faculties are well developed. Most small humans soon learn to distinguish pleasant from unpleasant sounds and most parents will witness that any tiny human in their household acts like a hyperactive radar of feelings and moods in their environment. You know it's no use telling baby in an irritated voice `Daddy's not angry' because the little human sees straight through such emotional bullshitting and starts to howl.
• But baby's hearing is not what most parents notice first about sound and their own addition to the human race. They are more likely to register the little sonic terrorist's capacity to scream, yell, cry and generally dominate the domestic soundscape. Babies are endowed with non-verbal vocal talents seemingly out of proportion to other aspects of their size, weight and volume: they appear to have inordinate lung power and unfailing vocal chords capable of producing high decibel and transient values, cutting timbres and irregular phrase lengths, all communicating messages that parents interpret as I 'm uncomfortable or I'm irritated or I'm in pain , or I'm hungry , messages demanding action such as change my nappies! or comfort me! or provide immediate nutrition! . Maybe these tiny humans have to yell not just because they can't speak but also because they need to dispel whatever state of adult torpor we happen to be in while watching TV, chatting, reading or, worst of all, sleeping. Babies seem to know in advance that sharp timbres at high pitch and volume carry well, cutting through whatever ambient hum and mumble there may be in the adult world, be it idle conversation, TV in the background, fridges, ventilation, etc. Also, irregular rhythms and intonation by definition avoid the sort of repetition that can gradually transform into ambient (background) sound: a baby's yell is always up front, foreground, urgent, of varying periodicity and quite clearly designed to shatter whatever else mother, father, big sister or big brother is doing. That sonic shattering is designed to provoke immediate response. Desires and needs must be fulfilled now .
• Now is the operative word here. Sonic statements formed as short repetitions of irregularly varying length are also statements of urgency, as well we know from news and documentary jingles -- important, flash, new, the latest update .45 Babies seem to have no conscious past or notion of future: all is present. The baby's lack of adult temporal perspective in relation to self is of course related to its lack of adult senses of social space, which, in its turn, relates to baby's egocentricity, essential for survival in the initial stages of its life.
• Non-verbal sound is essential to humans. We monitor it constantly from inside the womb until death or deafness do us part from its influence. We use our non-verbal voices to communicate all sorts of messages from the time we are born until we die or turn dumb. Together with the sense of touch, non-verbal sound is one of the most important sources of information and contact with social and natural environments at the most formative stages of any human's development. It is vital to senso-motoric and symbolic learning processes at the preverbal stage of development and central to the formation of any individual's personality. Moreover, we have all had to experience the process by which we gradually learn that we are not the centre of others' constant and immediate attention: we have to get used to being just one human subject and social object among many others. We have to have some sort of working relationship with whatever society and culture we belong to and we cannot live in the vain hope of returning to a state where we are the sonically dominant or foreground figures: we can never regain any imagined or real lost paradise, whatever advertisers, drug pedlars or pharmaceutical corporations may want us to believe.
• Different cultures and subcultures develop different norms for what course the process from baby via child to adult should run. The ultimate goal --becoming a fully functioning male or female adult-- depends on whatever the society in question at any given time sees as desirable on account of its material basis and cultural heritage. Assuming we have all been babies and if baby's power over the domestic soundscape in the early development of every human is a biological necessity that must be relinquished for that individual to survive among fellow humans in adulthood, then we ought to gain important insights into how any culture works by studying patterns of socialisation that relate directly to non-verbal sound.
• Humans can emit an enormous variety of non-verbal sounds. We breathe, talk, cry, shout, yell, call, sob, sigh, laugh, giggle, burp, fart, crunch, slurp, gulp, swallow, yawn, groan, moan, growl, cough, splutter, slobber, wheeze, sniffle, sneeze, kiss, hiss, snort, spit, scratch our heads, smack our lips, blow our noses, clear our throats, cough up phlegm, etc. Our hearts beat, tummies rumble and intestines gurgle. We make noise, however weak or strong, whenever we move our bodies --when we sit down or stand up, walk, run, stroll, tiptoe, limp, jump, hop, skip, drag our feet, stumble, fall, etc. We also shudder with fear, tremble with delight, or shiver with cold so that their our chatter. We make sound when we hit, kick, drag, push, cut, tap, pat, clap, caress, chop, saw, hammer, grind, scrape, slap, splash, smash, etc. Some of these sounds are loud, others soft; some are heavy, others light; some are fast, others slow; some are high-pitched, others less so; some are long or ongoing and repetitive, others short and discrete and so on. All these humanly produced sounds are made within a context that is itself full of sound. In urban industrialised societies we have fridges, freezers, computer drives, traffic, aeroplanes, mains hum, air conditioning and all sorts of other machines; elsewhere we may be able to hear wind in the trees, rain, sea swell, animals, birds, insects, running water, thunder, earthquakes, ice breaking, crisp or slushy snow under our feet, waves breaking on the shore, etc.
• Some of these sounds we make ourselves, others we just hear in a wide variety of acoustic settings, including those inside our own heads and bodies. Which (combinations of) sounds are evaluated as pleasant and unpleasant, which ones are deemed to be part of music and which ones not, will largely depend on the culture we belong to and on what sort of motoric and sonic behaviour prove to be generally compatible with the needs of that community, be it a youth subculture in late capitalism or a nomadic people using stone age technology.
• All of us have been babies and all of us have had to learn that we cannot for ever remain at the centre of the world around us, acoustically or otherwise. We have to learn to cooperate, to negotiate social space and uses for ourselves in relation to the community we belong to. Music and dance provide socially constructed sonic and kinetic frameworks for that learning process: most of us learn to sing, hum and whistle in accordance with the norms of what our culture regards as music, rather than just yelling, laughing, mumbling, or bashing objects at will. As we acquire the gift of language we learn to distinguish between humanly organised verbal and non-verbal sound. More importantly, by repeated exposure, within the music culture to which we belong, to the simultaneous occurrence of certain types of musical sound with certain types of action, attitude, behaviour, emotional state, environment, gesture, movement, personality, people, pictures, words, social functions, etc., we construct a vast array of categories combining several of the constituent elements just mentioned into overriding and integral musogenic `concepts'.
• Many of us also go on to learn how to play an instrument as a way of making sound whose functions are clearly different not only to those of spoken language but also to those we make when chopping wood, hammering nails, ironing clothes, doing the washing up, flushing the toilet, taking a shower, walking upstairs, driving a car, eating food, operating machinery, folding a newspaper, closing the door, etc., etc. It would, from the perspectives just presented, be absurd to regard music as some sort pleasant but parasitic appendage to human life --`auditory cheesecake' as one writer put it.46

Cross-domain representation and synaesthesis

• There are other reasons for understanding music as an essential part of the survival kit for any human society, not as just cultural icing on the socio-economic cake. These reasons are presented by Cross (1999) and can be summarised in the following simplified terms.
• Our capacity as humans to process signals from the world around us via different domains of representation (verbal, visual, motoric, emotional, etc.) seems to have been one of our species' great advantages in the evolutionary struggle, in that we can sort out abstractions of cause and effect by distinguishing between visual, verbal, sonic and motoric impulses. Those domains of representation are even located in different parts of the brain so that what we hear at a particular time (a sonic event) does not have to represent the same phenomenon as a movement or emotion we may experience at that same time. Put crudely, having to rush up in a panic as the alarm clock goes off does not make us think the alarm clock is stressed out.
• Of course, such domain-specific signal processing in no way prevents humans from making connections between several simultaneous domain-specific signals if they co-occur on a regular basis. For example, when a loving parent talks in a sing-song voice to a baby while holding and rocking it, the little one receives signals that are at the same time specific to the sonic, motoric and emotional domains of representation. As these combinations of domain-specific signals are repeated, the infant learns to make connections between them so that another, overriding or `embodying' type of representation comes into play. Such combinations of sonic, motoric and emotional signals are sometimes called proto-musical.47 They also relate to synaesthetic patterns of cognition.

Domains of representation and the `embodying' cross-domain level48

• The specific domains relating to (proto-) musical representation, shown in figure 1-See Domains of representation and the `embodying' cross-domain level, partially overlap and need some explanation.

The physical domain covers the ballistics, trajectory and kinetic relationship of a body (or bodies, including one's own) to the type of space through which it travels or in which it is motionless. Fast or slow, jerky or smooth, regular or irregular movement, or no movement at all, in an open or closed space; movement which arrives or leaves within that space, towards or away from a point inside or outside it, movement which waits or passes over or under, up or down, to the left or right, to the back or front, to and fro or in one direction, suddenly or gradually: these aspects of movement and space, when enacted by a human, are all part of the physical domain of representation. It also includes the enactment of some aspects of heaviness or darkness and lightness, of density and sparsity, as well as of multitude and singularity.

The gross motoric domain of representation involves the movement of arms, legs, head, etc., e.g. walking, running, jumping, dancing, pushing, pulling, thrusting, dragging, waving, rolling, hitting.

The fine motoric domain of representation involves the movement of fingers, eyes, lips, mouth, throat, etc. Blinking, glittering, shimmering, rustling, babbling, clicking, tapping, fiddling, dripping, spitting, swallowing, gurgling, etc. all exemplify movement requiring fine motoric representation.

The linguistic domain is mainly concerned with prosodic patterning, with the `musical' elements of speech, i.e. with intonation, timbre, accentuation, rhythm, dynamics, etc., including the sonic characteristics of vowels and consonants.

The social domain involves the representation of patterns of human interaction, for example of individuals to a group or vice versa. As we shall see later, particular strategies for structuring musical parts or voices can correspond to particular socialisation patterns.

The emotional domain is self-evident. It involves evaluating a situation in response to different body states such as posture, muscular tension or relaxation, hormonal stimulation, adrenalin count, etc. It includes evaluation of experience whose verbal conceptualisation is often formulated in polarities like pleasing/painful, happy/sad, beautiful/ugly, love/hate, security/threat, etc.

It should be clear that these six domains of representation are in no way mutually exclusive. For instance, it is impossible to imagine a gross motoric activity like dragging (domain 2) without considering bodily movement in space and aspects of heaviness (physical domain 1). Moreover, any aspect of the emotional domain needs to be qualified by aspects from other domains. For example, is the expression of pain sharp and sudden? Is it relentless, throbbing and ongoing, or is it stifled in the background? Does the pain come in gradual waves or as violent shocks? Does it make you quiver, shudder, jump, fall over, fall apart, yell, scream, groan or grumble? Or does it hit, stab, pierce or poison you? Or does it make you depressed and apathetic? Is the pain repressed and under control, or is it up front and violent? Perhaps it paralyses or silences you altogether? Is it the pain of a solitary individual or does it more closely resemble a community of suffering?

Proto-music's six domains of representation also overlap in terms of synaesthesis.49 For example, some onomatopoeic pairs, like babble and bubble or rumble and tumble, are normally, though not exclusively, associated with the sonic and visual/kinetic aspects respectively of the same basic type of movement, as, indeed, are rustle and glisten. Other sonically similar words like bustle, hustle and hassle not only lend themselves to expression in visual or sonic terms: they also include aspects of social interaction and emotional evaluation. It is the combination of all these aspects that makes such concepts particularly musogenic.

Before going any further in this explanation of cross-domain representation, it is necessary to clarify that we are using the noun synaesthesis, not synaesthesia, to denote any normal use of two or more modes of perception at the same time. While synaesthesia is generally used as a clinical term denoting a specific neurological condition involving the disturbance of normal perception by the involuntary intrusion of impulses from more than one sensory mode, synaesthesis is no more than a transliteration of synaisthêsis ( sunaisyhsiw ), aisthêsis meaning `perception' and syn = `[along] with', `accompanying', i.e. simultaneous perception in more than one sensory mode.50 Synaesthesis is therefore not a pathological condition but a normal and essential part of human cognition. The only terminological trouble here is that synaesthesis and synaesthesia both give rise to the adjective synaesthetic. To avoid further confusion, then, synaesthetic will in this book qualify any type of perception using more than one sensory mode at the same time. In more concrete terms, we shall qualify, for example, the combined tactile, kinetic, visual and sonic aspects of babble, bubble, bumble, rumble, crumble, tumble, rustle, bustle, hustle or hassle as synaesthetic because they constitute instances of normally functioning synaesthesis .51

To summarise the argument so far, music can, as we have defined it (p. See In this book, `music' will be understood as that form of interhuman communication in which humanly organised non-verbal sound can, following culturally specific conventions, carry meaning relating to emotional, gestural, tactile, kinetic, spatial and prosodic patterns of cognition.), be understood as a specifically human type of activity which lets us mix elements from any of the six domains of representation (p. See Domains of representation and the `embodying' cross-domain level) into an integral whole. It is an activity allowing us to represent combinations of signals from its constituent domains in one symbolic package rather than in merely linguistic, social or corporeal terms. As a meaningful system of non-verbal sound, music lets us engage in interpersonal activity on many levels simultaneously, either by making the music or by responding to it individually or together with others. To express ourselves on all these levels at the same time, humans do not always need to confront each other with verbal outbursts, bodily display or physical interaction: we can use music instead. In other words, music provides relatively risk-free action to members of the culture producing and using it because it provides socio-culturally regulated forms of potentially risky interaction between humans. But music does more than that in that it can also help avoid confusion. Avoid confusion? How can that be when music is so often thought of as `polysemic'? We had better explain (see also p. See Polysemy and connotative precision, ff.).

Imagine, for example, the not uncommon state of mind characterised by a mixture of, say, irritation or resentment and the feeling that is nevertheless a nice day and good to be alive. Using the linguistic domain, you could express this single dynamic state of mind directly to a friend, partner, child, parent, or to the authorities, telling them first how strongly you disapprove of their behaviour: you could start by speaking with sharp timbre and choppy delivery, then switch to a smooth, mellifluous voice. Using the fine motoric domain, you could frown then smile, tap your fingers nervously then flutter your eyelids encouragingly, grit your teeth then relax your mouth. Socially, you might want to avoid the people causing the irritation and then make efforts to welcome them into your company. Using the physical and gross motoric domains of representation to communicate your state of mind, you'd almost have to first beat up the person or people concerned, then caress or hug them. Emotionally, you'd probably want to first yell and stamp your feet, then sit down and relax; or perhaps you'd first tense your shoulders and clench your fists, then lean back, open your arms and show the palms of your hands.

Although feeling irritation on a basically good day is hardly a symptom of emotional instability, expressing that dynamic using just one of music's constituent domains of representation, as described in the previous paragraph, would at best come across as contradictory and confused. It would more likely cause offence, perhaps even provoke a diagnosis of manic depression. However, thanks to its character of cross-domain representation, music is able to mediate that same sort of dynamic as a unified single experience in a socially negotiated and culturally specific sonic form. After all, we seem to readily accept that the single linguistic concept of love involves feelings of vulnerable anxiety and the fear of loss in addition to the occasional, indescribably powerful bout of euphoria. Similarly, it is totally impossible for us mortals to entertain the notion of human life without considering death.52

These platitudes about love and life serve merely to illustrate the fact that while language only occasionally lets us conceptualise dynamic states of being as integral experiences, music almost always does so. Feeling angry on a good day , or desperately troubled in the midst of calm and beauty , or totally sick of the world and feeling alive because of that disgust -- these are no more than pale verbal hints of just part of three of the innumerable kinds of dynamic mood categories that music can create.53 We should therefore not be surprised that respected critics can describe the same piece of music --in this case the first movement of Mozart's 40th symphony-- in terms of both `deepest sadness' and `highest elation'.54 Was Mozart confused when he wrote the music? Probably no more so than usual. Does the music make a confused or contradictory impression? Certainly not to modern European ears: it's one of the most well-known, highly valued and widely covered pieces in the Viennese classical repertoire. Were the critics confused when they wrote about sadness and elation in the same breath about the same music? No again: they, too, were just giving pallid verbal hints of what they felt the music to be expressing.

By combining input from its constituent domains of representation, music forms integral categories of cognition that, from a logocentric viewpoint, would be qualified as contradictory, confused or polysemic, even though those categories seem to correspond more accurately with what we actually feel or imagine on a daily basis: angry on a good day, troubled in beautiful surroundings, sad and elated, vulnerable and euphoric, etc. This holistic aspect of musical cognition may well be one reason for music's ability to move us so deeply, sometimes even to occupy our whole sensory being. It may also be one reason for music's therapeutic usefulness. Furthermore, music helps cognitive flexibility, i.e. the ability to mix, switch and correlate across different domains of representation. Viewed from these perspectives, music may indeed be, as Cross (1999) concludes, `the most important thing that we humans ever did'.

Musical power agendas: a historical excursion

• One recurrent trait in documents about music from ancient `high' cultures (Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Chinese, Greek, etc.), is its link to official religious doctrine or to ostensibly indisputable physical phenomena.57 In ancient Mesopotamia (3,000-600 BC), for example, music theory was connected to astrology and mathematics. The idea was that if you knew the motions of the stars, if you believed in their sway over human destiny, then you understood the harmony of the universe. You could theoretically be at one with the universe by making music which abided by the rules of its harmony. Music of the court and of official religion was held to conform to such rules; that of other classes and peoples did not. It was through such metaphysical links that an oppressive political system could be identified with a system of musical organisation which was in its turn aligned with the immutable system of the universe. Like the deification of the worldly system's kings, metaphysical connections between the ruling classes, their music and the heavenly spheres created the illusion that their unjust political system was as great, as divine, as eternal, as unquestionable and as unchangeable as the universe.58
• Written records from ancient China are even more explicit. The tonal system of imperial music, based on observations about the relation of rising fifths to the perfect ratio 3:2, was put into a cosmic perspective. According to documents from around 450 BC, `[s]ince 3 is the numeral of Heaven and 2 that of the Earth, sounds in the ratio 3:2 harmonise as Heaven and Earth.'59 The importance of official music in ancient China and its connection with irrefutable truths is also demonstrated by the establishment of a Music Bureau (Yuefu
)) under the Imperial Office of Weights and Measures (141-87 BC). The Bureau's brief was to standardise pitch, supervise music and build up musical archives.60 More importantly, for over 2000 years of Chinese imperial history (221 BC - 1911), one set of musical practices was identified by ruling-class ideologues as the `right music': ya-yue ( `elegant music'), as it was called, refers both to court music of that long period and, more particularly, to court music associated with Confucian philosophy.61

The music of imperial Chinese courts, especially ya-yue (`elegant music'), was, as we just saw, related to the cosmic values of the numerals 2 and 3 which, in their turn, were related to notions of heaven and earth, male and female, Yang ( ) and Yin ( ), etc. Ya-yue was certainly regulated by strict rules of performance, not only in terms of detailed stage positions for instrumentalists and dancers, but also with regard to tonal norms. Intricate division and subdivision of genres in terms of both musical style and audience type illustrate further aspects of complex codification, as do the number of ancient texts setting out the history, aesthetics and metaphysics of imperial music-making. These sources also imply that knowledge of such intricacies was important for those producing and consuming the `elegant' music, whose history could be traced back to what was, even then, the distant past of an ancient dynasty.62 Moreover, imperial Chinese music could be reproduced quite consistently from one performance or generation to another, not only because of the many treatises codifying its aesthetics and practice, but also because certain types of notation were used. Although such notation, either as ideograms indicating pitch or as tabulature for string instruments, was probably used less prescriptively than the sheet music followed by classical musicians in the West, it at least helped ensure that singers and musicians could make the music they composed or performed conform adequately to prescribed patterns.

Similar hierarchies of music are found in written sources from other `high' cultures. For example, to qualify as art music (i.e. as belonging to the `Great Tradition'), Indian performing art, be it from the North or South, must, as Powers (1995:72) points out, satisfy two main criteria.

`Firstly it must establish a claim to be governed by authoritative theoretical doctrine; secondly, its practitioners must be able to authenticate a disciplined oral tradition of performance extending back over several generations.'

The important concept here is doctrine ( ~stra ), more specifically sangÿta-~stra (musical doctrine). For Indian music to qualify as doctrinally correct, it must adhere to at least one canonical point: melodic construction should be governed by one of the tradition's raga s .63 This rule is so important that the proper term for correct musical practices, astriya-sangit (`doctrinal music'), is less frequently used than r~gdar-sangit (music based on a raga). Indians also often use the English word `classical' when distinguishing raga traditions from popular music practices. The Oxford Concise English Dictionary (1995) defines `classical', qualifying the arts, as:

'serious or conventional; following traditional principles and intended to be of permanent rather than ephemeral value... representing an exemplary standard; having a long-established worth.'

• Calling astriya-sangit or r~gdar-sangit `classical music' is in other words quite appropriate because not only do buzzwords of higher and lasting value occur in the connotative spheres of both terms: astriya-sangit and `classical music' also both allude to notions of tradition, doctrine, convention and learning. Besides, astriya-sangit 's qualification as scientific or knowledgeable rhymes well with European-language equivalents of classical music, like musique savante , musica colta , música culta , música erudita, E-Musik , serious music and art music'.64 Unlike most types of `popular' and `folk' music, the musical practices qualified by such epithets as classical are all associated with doctrinal texts codifying the philosophy, aesthetics, performance, interpretation, understanding and structural basis of the music in question.
• To cut a long story short, the division of music in Western culture into categories of art or classical and folk or popular has numerous parallels and forerunners. It is even possible that elements of Mesopotamian theory passed via Greek and Arabic scholars into the metamusical mindset of Europe's medieval clerics and their trichotomy of musics.65 This trichotomy consisted of musica mundana (the music of the heavens, of spheres in the universe), musica humana (music providing equilibrium of soul and body and instilled by liturgical song) and musica instrumentalis (the singing and the playing of instruments that were at the service of the devil as well as of God). As Ling (1983: 97) explains:

'[I]n the world of heavenly light, the harmonious and well-tuned music of eternity is heard. Its opposite is the unbearable noise and dissonant, discordant music of hell. Both heaven and hell exist on earth: the music of heaven is reflected in liturgical chant --it is organised, well-measured and based on science and reason. All other music is of the devil, being chaotic, ill-measured and uneducated.'

• Since musica mundana was an entirely metaphysical idea (the music of the spheres, of heaven, of God's perfect creation, etc.), the real world contained only two sorts of music according to the aesthetic and religious precepts of the church fathers: (1) musica humana as the uplifting liturgical song of Mother Church and of God's representatives on earth and (2) musica instrumentalis as all other music, be it of the devil or of God. This basic dualism of musics changes character quite radically as part of the lengthy and complex process by which the value systems of feudal and ecclesiastical élites are supeseded by those of the ascendant bourgeoisie. It is important to understand these bourgeois music values because they have been at the basis of much discourse about music in Western institutions of education and research since the mid nineteenth century. These values of the musically Good, Beautiful and True still hold sway in many of our musical institutions and still exert a strong influence on what sort of meanings, if any, those of us who see ourselves as educated think that music can carry.

`Music is music'

• The notion of absolute music and of its superiority is probably the most striking feature of institutional music aesthetics in the Western world. Hegel, for example, made the following distinction between the musical values of the initiated and those of the average punter.

'[W]hat the layman (Laie) likes in music is the comprehensible expression of emotions and ideas, something substantial, its content, for which reason he prefers accompanimental music (Begleitmusik); the connoisseur (Kenner), on the other hand, who has access to the inner musical relation of tones and instruments, likes instrumental music for its artistic use of harmonies and of melodic intricacy as well as for its changing forms; he can be quite fulfilled by the music on its own.'66

• The most famous absolute music aphorism was formulated in 1854 by Austrian music critic Eduard Hanslick who, in his treatise On Musical Beauty (1854), wrote: `Music's complete content and total subject matter is nothing other than tonal forms in movement.'67 Since then, similar views of music have ruled the roost in Western art music circles to such an extent that some composers whose `tonal forms in movement' clearly relate to `other subject matter' have denied any such relation. Stravinsky (1882-1971), for example, once quipped that his music expressed nothing but itself, implying that stage works of his (Petrushka, The Firebird, The Rite of Spring, for example) were `pure' music.68 It may be true that Stravinsky, like David Bowie, frequently recast his public persona but the very fact that he saw fit, even just once, to do so from the standpoint of musical absolutism suggests that adopting that view may have advanced his artistic credibility in influential circles. This is certainly what Mahler (1860-1911) once felt compelled to do: having already written programme notes to his first three symphonies, he is reported to have raised his glass at a meeting with Munich illuminati in 1900 and to have exclaimed `death to all programme music'.69
• The pressure on composers to conform to the notion of absolute music throughout the twentieth century cannot be underestimated. For example, famous film composers like Korngold (1897-1957) and Rózsa (1907-1995) lived double lives: they felt compelled to separate their `music for music's sake' from their work for the movies.70 Similarly, until quite recently Morricone sometimes expressed disappointment at the scant recognition he received for his concert music, however widely acclaimed he may have been as a musical pioneer because of his work for the cinema .71 The point is: if the institutional dominance of absolutist aesthetics can affect the lives of widely acclaimed figures like Mahler, Korngold, Rózsa and Morricone, then such a view of music will have exerted just as much influence on lesser figures in conservatories and departments of music(ology).
• For example, when Francès (1958) conducted his pioneering research into the perception of music, he received several indignant responses from his music student informants in which they expressed strong absolutist views, for example:

`No, no and no again. Music is music, I cannot conceive of it as a source of emotional or literary ramblings.'72

• I still (2007) occasionally meet individuals who take unmistakeable offence at the mere suggestion that music can relate to anything except itself. Musical absolutism, it seems, still exerts a strong influence on what many consider music to be capable or incapable of communicating. Obviously, in order to understand the effects of such influence, a prerequisite for presenting viable methods of music analysis, we will need first to examine the notion of absolute music and to explain the reasons for its tenacity.

Structural denotors

The third anomaly is really another aspect of the second. It highlights disparity between the analytical metalanguage of music in the Western world and that of other symbolic systems; more specifically, it deals with peculiarities in the derivation patterns of terms denoting structural elements in music (structural denotors) when compared to equivalent denotative practices applied in linguistics or the visual arts. This third anomaly requires some clarification.

It is possible at this stage, using a simplified version of terms explained in Chapter 5, to equate the notion of a `musical structure' or `structural element' with Peirce's sign, i.e. that part of musical semiosis which represents whatever is encoded by a composer, performer, studio engineer, etc. (the sign's object) and which forms whatever is decoded by a listener (the sign's interpretant). For example, the final chord of the James Bond theme (Em Δ9 ), played on a Fender Stratocaster treated with slight tremolo and some reverb, is a structural element (sign) encoding whatever its composer, arranger, guitarist and recording engineer intended (object) and decoded as listener response (interpretant) verbalisable in approximate terms like an excitement/action cue associated with crime, spies, danger, intrigue, etc.94 The musical structure (sign) is described here from a poïetic standpoint: `Em Δ9 ' (`E minor major nine') designates how the chord is constructed, `Fender Stratocaster' the instrument on which that chord is played and so on. The description is not aesthesic because it is not presented in terms of its interpretant: it is not identified as a `danger cue', `spy sound', `crime chord', etc.95 X 00

In what comes next, therefore, poïetic will qualify terms which denote a structural element of music from the viewpoint of its construction in that such a term derives primarily from the techniques and/or materials used to produce that element (e.g. con sordino, glissando, major minor-nine chord, analogue string pad, phasing, anhemitonic pentatonicism). Aesthesic, on the other hand, will qualify terms denoting structural elements primarily from the viewpoint of perception (e.g. allegro, legato, spy chord, Scotch snap, cavernous reverb).96

• In the analysis of visual art, it seems, at least from a layperson's point of view, that it is just as common for the identification of structural elements to derive from notions of iconic representation or of cultural symbolism as from concepts of production materials and technique. For example, structural descriptors like gouache or broad strokes clearly derive from aspects of production technique and are therefore poïetic, while the iconic representation of a dog in a figurative work of art would be called dog, an aesthesic term, rather than be labelled with details of how the visual sign of that dog was produced. Moreover, the dog in, say, Van Eyck's famous Arnolfini marriage portrait97 could also be considered a sign on indexical as well as iconic grounds, if it were established that dog was consistently interpreted in a similar way by a given population of viewers in a given social and historical context: the dog might be understood as recurrent symbol of fidelity, in which faithful dog would work as an aesthesic descriptor on both indexical and iconic grounds.

In linguistics there also seems to be a mixture of poïetic and aesthesic descriptors of structure. For example, the phonetic term voiced palato-alveolar fricative is poïetic in that it specifies the sound / Z / by denoting how it is produced or constructed, not how it is normally perceived or understood:98 it is an etic (as in `phonetic') rather than emic (as in `phonemic') term. One the other hand, terms like `finished' and `unfinished', used to qualify pitch contour in speech, are aesthesic rather than poïetic. Moreover, such central concepts of linguistics as `phoneme' and `morpheme' work both poïetically and aesthesically in that they designate structures according to their ability to carry meaning from the viewpoint of both speaker and listener. / Z /, for example, understood as a phoneme (`emic' again), rather than as a voiced palato-alveolar fricative (`etic'), denotes the structural element that allows both speaker and listener to distinguish in British English between :lEZ´ (leisure) and :lED´ (leather) or :lEt´ (letter).

• Given these perspectives, it should be clear that, compared to the study of visual arts and of spoken language, conventional music analysis in the West exhibits a predilection for poïetic terminology, sometimes excluding aesthesic categories from its vocabulary altogether. This terminological tendency may be fine for trained musicians but it prevents the majority of people from verbally denoting musical structures.

Skills, competences, knowledges

The fourth anomaly involves inconsistency in Western thinking with regard to the status of aesthesic competence in language compared to other symbolic systems. Whereas the ability to understand both the written and spoken word (aesthesic skills) is generally held to be as important as speaking and writing (poïetic skills), aesthesic competence is not held in equal esteem when it comes to music and the visual arts. For example, teenagers able to make sense of multiple intertextual visual references in computer games are not usually dubbed artistic, nor credited with the visual literacy they clearly own. Similarly, the widespread and empirically verifiable ability to distinguish between, say, two different types of detective story after hearing no more than two seconds of TV music does not apparently allow us to qualify the majority of our population as musical. Indeed, artistic usually seems to qualify solely poïetic skills in the visual arts sphere and musicality seems to apply only to those who perform as vocalists, or who play an instrument, or can decipher musical notation. It is as though the musical competence of the non-muso majority of the population did not count. The fifth and final anomaly, in fact a set of two times two dichotomies, offers some clues as to a possible remedy.

Table 3-See Types of musical knowledge divides musical knowledge into two main categories: music as knowledge and knowledge about music. By the former is meant knowledge that relates directly to musical discourse and that is both intrinsically musical and culturally specific. This type of musical knowledge can be divided into two subcategories: poïetic competence, i.e. the ability to compose, arrange or perform music, and aesthesic competence, i.e. the ability to recall, recognise and distinguish between musical sounds, as well as between their culturally specific connotations and social functions. Neither poïetic nor aesthesic musical competence relies on any verbal denotation and are both more usually referred to as skills or competences rather than as knowledge.

The institutional underpinning of division between these four types of musical knowledge is strong in the West. In tertiary education, poïetic competence (1a) is usually taught in special colleges or conservatories, musical metadiscourse in departments of music or musicology as well as in conservatories or colleges, and contextual metadiscourse (2b) in practically any humanities or social science department, less so in music colleges and conventional music(ology) departments.

Aesthesic competence (1b) is virtually impossible to place institutionally because the ability to distinguish, without resorting to words, between musical sounds, as well as between their culturally specific connotations and social functions is, with the exception of isolated occurrences in aural training and in some forms of `musical appreciation', generally absent from institutions of learning. Aesthesic competence remains a largely vernacular and extracurricular affair. Indeed, there are no courses in when and when not to bring out your lighter at a rock concert, nor in when and when not to stage dive, not even in when and when not to applaud during a jazz performance or at a classical concert. And what about the ability to distinguish musically between degrees of threat, between traits of personality, between social or historical settings, between states of mind, behavioural attitudes, types of love or of happiness, sadness, wonder, anger, pleasure, displeasure, etc.; or between types of movement, of space, of location, of scenario, of ethnicity and so on? Those sorts of musical competence are rarely acquired in the classroom: they are usually learnt in front of the TV or computer screen, or through interaction with peers and with other social groups. In fact, the epistemic problem with music, as it has in general been academically categorised in the West, can be summarised in two main points.

Firstly, knowledge relevant to music's production and structural denotation have been largely separated from those related to its perception, uses and meanings. Established institutions of musical education and research have therefore tended to favour etic rather than emic and poïetic rather than aesthesic perspectives. Such imbalance, in symbiosis with a long history of class-specifically powerful and metaphysical notions of `good' music's absolute and transcendent qualities (pp. See Articles of faith-.). This imbalance has also exacerbated ontological problems of music's alogogenicity and made the incorporation of musical knowledge(s) into a verbally and scribally dominated tradition of learning an even more difficult task.

Secondly, the virtual absence of aesthesic learning (knowledge type 1b) in official education has meant that, compared to analytical metalanguage used with visual or verbal arts, relatively few viable aesthesic denotors of structure exist in musical scholarship. This paucity of user-oriented terminology has restricted musicology's ability to address the semantic and pragmatic aspects essential to musical semantics. If that were not the case, this book would be totally superfluous. In addition to these two overriding problems relevant to the development of a simple semiotic approach to music analysis (the real subject of this book), one final major issue of institutional legacy needs to be addressed: musical notation.

Notation: `I left my music in the car'

Meaning, sign, semiotics

• Meaning, in the sense of one thing conveying, indicating or referring to something else, is a recurrent concept in this book. Signification, treated here as a virtual synonym to meaning, contains the morpheme sign. Sign, in its turn, simply means a thing indicating or representing something other than itself. It is in this sense that Charles S Peirce, US philosopher and father of modern semiotics, ended up by using the word.146 Sign also turns up in expressions like sign system and sign type.
• Sign system denotes a large set of conventions of meaning, like this kind of written English, or like impressionist painting, or like music for silent films in the West. Sign type designates the particular way in which a sign relates to what it signifies, for example, if it physically resembles what it means (icon, see p. See Icon) or if the relation is largely arbitrary or conventional (see p. See An arbitrary sign .). Sign is also a translation of the Ancient Greek words s êma ( sÆma ) and sêmeíon ( shme>on) found at the root of words like semiotics, semiology, semiosis, semaphore and semantics.
• Semiotics , deriving from Peirce's semeiotic, means the systematic study of sign systems. Semiology , a term coined by Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, is generally used to mean the same thing as semiotics.147 There are some important differences, a few of which will be discussed shortly, between Peircean and Saussurean terminology. Saussure's most widely used concepts are probably the signifier (signifiant ≈ sign) and the signified (signifié = what the sign stands for or represents).

Semiosis

• Semiosis means the active process by which meaning is produced and understood. It includes the totality of, and the connections between, three elements that Peirce called sign, object and interpretant. As already suggested, it is simplest to think of the sign as a thing, with a physical existence of its own, that represents or stands for something other than itself. Let's put some meat on this theoretical bone.
• Let's say that the sign is a photo you took of your aunt's dog. The photo clearly isn't your aunt's dog --it's a photo of it--, even though you might point to the photo and say `that's my aunt's dog'. In fact, the photo represents your aunt's dog because that's what you saw when you took the photo. It's your visual perception of the dog at that moment which, in Peirce's terms, constitutes the object represented by the photo as its sign. When you look at the photo now and see my aunt's dog , your visual perception cannot logically correspond 100% with what you saw when you took the photo (its object). This perception and interpretation of the sign, rather than your perception of the dog when you took the photo, is called its interpretant. Now this distinction between object and interpretant might seem like scholastic nit-picking because it´s obvious that the photo looks like your aunt's dog! Yes, indeed, but that very obviousness can be a problem because differences between object and interpretant, as well as between interpretants, do occur. In fact those differences cause meanings to be renegotiated, to change and to adapt to new needs, functions and situations. Let's go back to your aunt's dog and put some more meat on the poor animal's conceptual bone.
• Many years after taking the snapshot, you open your family album and look at that same old photo of your aunt's dog. Note first that it has now become `that same old photo'. Time has passed, you are different, and circumstances have changed but the photo remains the same. Maybe your beloved aunt has died in the meantime, or maybe you subsequently learnt things about her that put her in a bad light. Or perhaps you yourself now have a devoted dog, or perhaps you were badly bitten recently by one like your aunt's. Any of these factors could easily affect the interpretant[s] you form when looking at the same photo at that later date. True, the prosaic my aunt's dog aspect of the interpretant will still work after all those years, but it will likely give rise to an array of different final interpretants, ranging from wistful longing for bygone days, when you were a child and you played with your kind aunt's dog, to what a mangy mongrel! or what a mean old woman! And just wait until you show your my aunt's dog photo to friends and family! When you do, they will, in their turn, form other final interpretants of the photo. The content of those interpretants will depend on things like how well your family or friends knew your aunt and her dog, on whether or not they like dogs, whether or not they like you, and on a whole host of other factors. Whatever the case may be, this my aunt's (shaggy) dog story illustrates the necessity of distinguishing between object and interpretant, as well as between interpretants, in relation to the sign. These distinctions are essential when it comes to understanding how musical signs work, how the same sounds can mean different things to different people at different times and so on.
• A complementary way of understanding semiosis is, as just inferred, to look at it in terms of a message and its communication. There are three main aspects to this process, too: [1] the thing or idea to be encoded (similar to Peirce's object), [2] the concrete form of that code --the sign-- and [3] the decoded version or interpretation of that code (similar to Peirce's interpretant). Seen in this light of intention and interpretation, the `ideal' semiosis would theoretically produce total unity between the sign as semiotically intended and as interpreted. The word chair would, for example, represent a fully identical notion of chair in the minds of both speaker/writer (as an object) and listener/reader (as an interpretant), while the photo of your aunt's dog would be perceived, by anyone at any time, in exactly the same way as you saw the dog when you took the photo. Since exact correspondence between intended and interpreted message is impossible (and we shall shortly discover how, even in the case of chair), semiosis is also sometimes used to refer to processes by which meanings of existing signs are modified and re-negotiated, as with your interpretants that changed over time in relation to the same my aunt's dog photo.

To put a musical slant on these observations about shifts of meaning, just think of the distinctive wining sound of the pedal steel guitar in Country & Western music (C&W). This sound may have derived something from dobro and slide guitar techniques in the US south, but its most obvious sonic forerunner is the Hawaiian guitar, highly popular in the USA in the late 1920s and early 1930s, before electrically amplified musical instruments were commonplace. To cut a long story short, from originally connoting things like Hawaii and sunshine , those steel guitar glissandi (swooping, sliding sounds) were gradually incorporated into the C&W mainstream and ended up as mere style indicators of Country music without the Hawaiian connotations.148 The advantage of looking at semiosis in such ways is that, by including intention as well as interpretation, the semiotic process is more open to understanding in terms of social and cultural interaction.

Semantics

Semantics , a term coined by French linguist Michel Bréal, is defined by my dictionary as `the study of the relationships between signs... and what they represent'.149 Semantics is just one aspect of semiotics (or semiology) and the word is often used in contradistinction to both [a] syntax (the formal relationships of one sign to another without necessarily considering their meaning) and [b] pragmatics (the use of a sign system in concrete situations, especially in terms of cultural, ideological, economic and social activity). Now, as we noted earlier, to prevent semantics, the main focus of this book, from becoming a `perverse discipline' (Eco, 1990: 259), it must be related to pragmatics. This imperative has at least two important implications.

Eco's imperative firstly implies that a synchronic semantics (examining signs at one given point in time in one given culture) is not enough on its own: it needs a diachronic perspective that involves studying meaning as part of a dynamic sign system subject to change. The from Hawaii to Country mainstream process, described above, illustrates a diachronic line of semantic reasoning that can also be called etymophonic. I apologise for introducing yet another term, but etymophony is a useful concept and quite easy to understand, as follows. If etymology studies the `historically verifiable sources of the formation of a word and the development of its meanings', etymophony simply means studying the origins of a sonic structure and the development of its meanings and functions over time. Etymophony is, in short, an important part of diachronic semantics in music.

The second implication of Eco's imperative is both synchronic and diachronic. It entails relating semantics (`relationships between signs and what they represent') to factors in the socio-cultural field in which the musical meanings under examination are generated and used. These meanings obviously both inform and are informed by value systems, identities, economic interests, ideologies and a whole host of other factors that constitute the socio-cultural biosphere without which music and its meanings, as just one semiotic sub-system among many others, cannot logically exist. We shall soon return to one aspect of this essential part of musical semantics (see `Codal interference', p. See Codal interference, ff.).

Semiotics and semiology

When denoting the study of sign systems, speakers of French and Spanish seem to prefer sémiologie /semiologia, while anglophones, Italians and others tend to use semiotics/semiotica. This confusion may eventually be resolved like the VHS versus Betamax battle over videocassette formats in the 1980s but it is impossible to predict which concept, if indeed either, will oust the other. In the meantime, semiotics rather than semiology will be used here for two reasons. [1] A book written in English ought logically to use English-language terms. [2] Two of Peirce's numerous trichotomies (sign - object - interpretant and icon - index - `symbol') substantially inform the conceptual basis of what follows. Even so, in order to save space, Saussure's binary notion of signifier and signified, where signifier is roughly equivalent to Peirce's sign and signified means what the sign stands for (in terms of both object and interpretant), will sometimes be used as shorthand, not as a replacement, for Peirce's trichotomy sign - object - interpretant. Another terminological problem is that Peirce uses symbol to denote what Saussure calls sign and vice versa. To avoid this confusion when discussing semiosis, I shall try to avoid symbol altogether and stick to sign in the Peircean sense. That means Peirce's symbol / Saussure's sign needs another label. Arbitrary sign is what I use to cover the concept (p. See An arbitrary sign (Peirce's symbol).

Two Peircean trichotomies

Denotation and connotation

Denotation and connotation designate two different types of semiosis. By denotation is meant the lexical type of meaning associated with dictionary definitions and with arbitrary signs. The word table , for instance, denotes `a flat horizontal slab or board supported by one or more legs'; it doesn't connote it. Similarly, theology doesn't connote the idea of studying religious beliefs: it denotes that idea. However, in the statement smoke means fire, neither the phenomenon smoke nor the word smoke denotes fire: it is the perception of smoke that connotes the presence of fire through causal indexicality. Despite the fact that smoke means fire exemplifies a much more tangible type of semiosis than does theology's link with the idea of studying religions, denotation is still often considered to be a less vague type of semiosis than connotation. Eco (1990: 6) challenges this assumption, branding the imagined solidity of denotative signification through arbitrary signs `rigid designation', adding that language `always says something more than its inaccessible literal meaning'. If Eco's observation is true for language, it is even more relevant to music which, as we just saw, rarely uses arbitrary signs. Since music is, on the other hand, highly connotative, it is worth examining the concept of indexical connotation in more detail, applying Eco's ideas to the semiosis involved in the statement `smoke means fire'.

I've shortened the saying where there's smoke there's fire to smoke means fire . In so doing, I substituted an observation of simultaneity with one of causality. I can do that because, unless we're talking about stage smoke (liquid CO2), fire causes smoke. Now fit your smoke alarm as instructed (good) and go to sleep with a burning cigarette (bad). Your smoke alarm wakes you up. Its piercing alarm sound is triggered by smoke caused by fire. You hear the sharp beeps and you know the alarm sound (the sign) means fire (interpretant) and other alarming things, like get out of bed, rush out of the house and don't die (final interpretants). The alarm sound doesn't denote fire like the word fire, nor does it directly mean fire indexically like the smoke you see that is caused by fire you don't necessarily see. The connection between the smoke alarm sound and fire is one of connotation : the alarm connotes a particular sort of fire and everything you know goes with it, because the relationship between the alarm sound as signifier and the fire as signified, with all its connotations, presupposes previously established levels of signification . These distinctions do not constitute conceptual nit-picking: they are an essential step in understanding how connotation, such an important aspect of musical semantics, actually works.

The `previous levels' just mentioned are all indexical and causal, namely the relationships [1] between the alarm sound and smoke (smoke triggers the alarm), [2] between smoke and fire (fire causes smoke), [3] between fire and danger (babies have to learn that fire hurts). With these previous levels of signification you are able to connote the specific threats of multiple burns, asphyxiation and possible death with the sound of a smoke alarm. In Eco's terms (1976: 55), `connotation arises when a signification is conveyed by a previous signification, which gives rise to a superelevation of codes'. The form of this `connotative semiotics' is shown in table 5-See Smoke alarm: connotation as superelevation of previous signification.

Polysemy and connotative precision

• Polysemic --from Greek poly ( polÊ = many) and séma ( sÆma = sign)-- means signifying many things at the same time, i.e. that the same sign is linked to many different objects and/or interpretants. Now, there is no doubt that music is polysemic from a logocentric viewpoint and I often produce the lexically incongruent concepts Austria and shampoo to illustrate the point. Austria is a middle-sized Central European nation famous for its capital city, Vienna, for mountains, Strauss waltzes, downhill skiing, Mozart and a host of other things that have nothing to do with viscose liquid that comes in small plastic bottles and that you apply to your scalp when washing your hair. Despite these radical and patent differences between the two phenomena, I claim that Austria and shampoo belong to the same, well-defined semantic field. That sounds like nonsense, so I'd better explain. X 00
• A one-minute extract from a romantic film theme (The Dream of Olwen by Charles Williams) was played without visual accompaniment to 607 listeners. Respondents were asked to jot down notes for a suitable film scenario or anything else that came into their mind when hearing the piece. The most common responses were love, romance and either a couple or a single woman seen strolling through the grass of a summer meadow . Other common responses were waving corn, rolling hills , the long flowing hair and dress of the woman they saw, the swell of the sea in a summer breeze, billowing sails , a flowing river , olden times , etc. Many respondents imagined scenarios in either England, France or Austria . Now, the Austria envisaged by respondents was not the Dolomites in bad weather, nor skiing at Kitzbühel, nor eating Sachertorte in a Konditorei, nor the airport or oil refinery at Schwechat. No, it was the Austria of The Sound of Music, in particular a woman in a long dress strolling through green meadows . This cluster of responses describes the scene, shown as Figure 5-See Austria: Julie Andrews bursts into song ), in which Julie Andrews bursts into the film's title song (´The hills are alive with the sound of music'). Now, that scene features a fine open-landscape panorama quite different to the confines of a shower cabin where shampoo is applied to the scalp. The question is obvious: how can shampoo be related to strolling in the green grass of an open meadow?
• Well, the shampoo respondents mentioned was no more shampoo as such than the Austria they saw was lexically Austria. Respondents were in fact alluding to a Timotei shampoo advert featuring a young Nordic woman, with long, flowing blonde hair and a long, flowing, old-style white cotton dress, moving in slow-motion through the long grass of a summer meadow and watched longingly by a young man in the background (Fig 5-See (left) Shampoo: Timote. It is an image derivative of the famous meadow love scene in Elvira Madigan (Fig. 5-See (left) Shampoo: Timotei advert).

Austria: Julie Andrews bursts into song in The Sound of Music
Still captured from DVD © 20th Century Fox, 1958, 1965, 1993

• Obvious similarities between these pictures (Fig. 5-See Austria: Julie Andrews) suggest that respondents, some of whom said Austria and others shampoo , were not in the least bit confused about what sort of scenario, movements, gestures, activities, emotions or moods they got from hearing the music, even though there is no connection between dictionary definitions of Austria and shampoo. It is therefore only from a lexically logocentric viewpoint, that Austria and shampoo , not to mention hills , hair , cornfields, sailing ships, dresses and manor houses , all common responses to the same music, can be considered contradictory, incongruous or polysemic.
• Observations similar to those just made about Austria and shampoo apply just as well to very different sets of musical sounds, for instance those associated with city streets at night, with concrete, rain, crime, delinquency, flickering lights, urban loneliness, etc. This latter set of sounds and those of the Austria and shampoo piece cover mutually distinguishable fields of connotation, but the fact that each of the two sets of associations contains lexically disparate concepts does not mean the two fields of connotation are in themselves musically contradictory. On the contrary, play the music connoting either of those moods to anyone belonging to the culture in and for which the music was produced, and listeners will be in no doubt about which is which. Misconceptions of music as polysemic arise partly because academe demands that we present ideas about music, not in music, not even in terms of moving picture or of dance, but in words. These notions of music's supposed polysemy can be questioned in at least two other ways: [1] by considering different symbolic representations of the same physical reality; [2] by turning the tables on denotative language and by branding it as polysemic instead.

Castletown: same geography, different visual representations

• Figure 5-See Castletown: same geography, different visual representations shows three different black-and-white representations of the same geographical location --the area around Castletown, near the southern tip of the Isle of Man (UK). Image 5-See Castletown: same geography, different visual representationsA, from an Ordnance Survey map, features roads, railways, built-up areas and place names. The curve of the bay in image A recurs, seen from a slightly different angle, in the tilted Google Earth image B. Image B gives only two place names and its low resolution obscures most road trajectories, even though the image's original colour version gives a good clue as to variations in surface terrain. Image C, a geological cross-section from northwest to southeast through the same area, bears no apparent resemblance to either A or B.
• These three images of the same location focus attention on differences in the nature and function of the visual sign system operative in each case. Images A and B can't be polysemic just because the area's geological details aren't included, any more than image C can be called vague because it doesn't show buildings, roads or the varying colours of the surface terrain. The point is that a physical location can be visually represented in an almost infinite number of ways, each symbolising different aspects of the same reality from different perspectives, using different rules of stylisation and abstraction, as well as different techniques for encoding different types of information for different purposes. If it is accepted that the same location can be visually symbolised in such different ways for such different purposes, how come music, whose basic nature and functions differ so radically from those of language or from graphic forms of representation, is expected to live up to linguistic or visual rather than musical criteria of semiotic precision? Since different individuals within the same culture tend repeatedly to respond to the same music in similar ways, music cannot reasonably be considered polysemic. To underline the problem with logocentric thinking about musical meaning, you only need to apply musocentric arguments to language and ask, for example, what the sound of the spoken word table [ »tEIbÇl ] really means. True, like mesa, Tisch, trap§zi , pöytä, pqmj and other words denoting `a flat horizontal slab or board supported by one or more legs', table is pretty monosemic, but it is, as »tEIbÇl , musically indistinguishable from rhyming words like able, Babel, bagel, cable, cradle, Dave'll [do it], fable, gable, label, ladle, Mabel, navel or stable, each spoken with the same voice, intonation, timbre, inflexion, accentuation and speed of delivery. However, whereas no sane musicologist would dream of calling language polysemic just because all but the most onomatopoeic of words are musically ambiguous, many people still think of music as polysemic, just because musical categories of signification do not coincide with verbal ones. This logocentric fallacy, part of the epistemic inertia discussed in Chapter 3, can also be refuted with the help of two final examples relating to a very simple, tangible, concrete and ostensibly denotative noun: chair.

What does chair mean? You can sit on one type in the kitchen, in another in front of the TV; you can take the chair at a meeting, occupy another sort at a university and be sent to a final one in a Texas prison. Chair has to do for the lot of them and only the noun's context or the addition of qualifiers like kitchen, easy, research or electric, will clarify which chair is relevant. Words, in other words, even nouns denoting concrete objects, can be context sensitive and polysemic.

The spoken word chair [ tSE¯Ç ] is as musically polysemic as singing the Twilight Zone jingle is verbally polysemic.156 Neither utterance carries clear meaning if judged according to the norms of semiosis applicable to the other sign system. A verbal statement is made less polysemic by prosody, i.e. by the `musical' elements of speech --intonation, timbre, rhythm, etc.-- just as musical discourse gains in precision if linked to words, actions, pictures, etc.

• In short, precision of musical meaning can never be the same as precision of verbal meaning. Music and language are not interchangeable sign systems: if they were, they would not exist separately. It is for this tautologous reason that connotations given in response to the Austria and shampoo and urban alienation pieces of music mentioned earlier must be understood as belonging to musogenic, not logogenic, categories of meaning: connotations elicited by music are verbally accurate in relation not to verbal but to musical discourse. Music is an alogogenic sign system whose semantic precision relies largely on connotation and on indexical signs. Mendelssohn put it this way:

`The thoughts which are expressed to me by a piece of music which I love are not too indefinite to be put into words, but on the contrary too definite.'157

Basic communication model

• Figure 5-See Musical communication model in a socio-cultural framework (p. See Musical communication model in a socio-cultural framework) is supposed to visualise basic elements of musical communication within a socio-cultural framework. The twisted arrows at the top and bottom of the diagram indicate that the model should be read as vertically circular, so that the store of signs and the sociocultural norms are seen as part of the same constellation of culturally specific values and activities, part of the same socio-cultural field. More precisely, the store of signs is really just one of the socio-cultural norms shown at the bottom of the model because it contains all the social conventions of what constitutes music in the relevant culture, as well as all the socially negotiated norms about which elements of music have which connotations and are suited to which purposes, etc. I apologise for this problem of graphic representation but we need to distinguish between two types of `non-communication' (incompetence and interference) and I was unable to graphically encode, all in one single diagram, that important distinction while at the same time visualising the store of signs as a subset of sociocultural norms.
• In fact, the diagram should really be spherical and (at least) three-dimensional, because it is also horizontally circular, as suggested by the various arrows at the left and right edges. These arrows show that the uses to which we put the music we hear and the meanings we attribute to it, whether or not those uses and meanings are intended by those who made the music, influence the symbolic and behavioural conventions (the store of signs and the socio-cultural norms) which, in their turn, form the cultural starting point without which music's `transmitters' cannot meaningfully produce work as composers, arrangers, musicians, singers, recording engineers, producers, DJs, etc.
• Since Figure 5-1 is spherical, you could theoretically trace any musical communication process starting at any point in the diagram. For example, many scholars have, without considering musical semantics, instructively examined interactions relating to music in the socio-cultural field, such as those between commercial and aesthetic value, between patterns of ethnic, religious, sexual or social identity and their representation in the media, etc. In such cases, the communication model would almost certainly, like the geographical representations in Figure 5-See Castletown: same geography, different visual representations (p. See Castletown: same geography, different visual representations), look very different. Be that as it may, since the main focus of this book is semantic, it is logical to put the process of musical `message' at the centre of the model (the transmitter-channel-receiver line). That process runs as follows: the intended message, informed by specifics of transmitter subjectivity in objective relation to the socio-cultural field, passes from idea or intention, via its concretion in sonic form (`channel') to `receivers' who respond to what they hear. Let's zoom in on that central semantic line in the communication process.

Musical communication model in a socio-cultural framework

• By transmitter is meant any individual or group of individuals producing music --composer, arranger, musician, vocalist (including you singing in the shower), recording engineer, DJ, etc. By channel or coded message is meant the music as it sounds (an array of signs), while receivers are those hearing or using the music, be they simultaneously the music's transmitters or not. The intended message, similar to Pierces's object, is what transmitters hope to express --the right sounds at the right time in the right order creating the right `feel', so to speak. Since transmitters very rarely use words to conceptualise their intended messages --they do that in music!--, I have provided some verbal approximations hinting at a range of `feels' that a musician working in the Western media might have to consider producing (see Figure 5-See Ethnocentric selection of connotative spheres (`feels'/`moods')).

 

Ethnocentric selection of connotative spheres (`feels'/`moods')159

rock 'n' roll kick-ass	ethereal sublimity	erotic tango
rural loneliness	urban loneliness	muso jazz cleverness
street-philosophising PI	gospel ecstatic	brave new machine world
yuppie yoghurt lifestyle	cheerful children	sex, aerobics style
headbanging thrash	romantic sensuality	bitter-sweet innocence
noble suffering	slavery, drudgery	wide-screen Western
Italian Western	medieval meditation	hippy meditation
psychedelia	evil East Asians	nice East Asians
savage Indians	noble Native Americans	slapstick comedy
pomp and circumstance	sixties sound	acid house body immersion
cybernetic dystopia	death by frostbite	twinkling happy Christmas
football singalong	music hall pub song	Methodist hymn
pastoral idyll	the throbbing tropics	inexorable violence
horror	mystery	grace and sophistication
Dracula's drooling organ	depravity and decadence	scorching sun, blistering heat
wide and open	smoky dive	Arabic sound
West African drums	distant bagpipe	Barry Manilow ballad
Abba Aphex sound	laid-back rock ballad	seventies disco
1930s German cabaret	Aboriginals	inconsolably unjust tragedy
pagan ritual	religious wonder	Celtic mists
lullaby	the march of death	existential Angst

• Even though musicians within the European and North American cultural sphere might never use any of the words in Figure 5-See Ethnocentric selection of connotative spheres (`feels'/`moods') to describe any musical idea, the professionals among them would still be able to come up with sounds corresponding to most of the `feels' in the list. Similarly, codally competent listeners from the same cultural background would be able to distinguish that music according to categories similar to those in Figure 5-See Ethnocentric selection of connotative spheres (`feels'/`moods'), a list that could go on for ever or include a totally different selection of mood categories. The point here is just to give some examples, in the form of pallid verbal approximations in the very verbal medium that is this book, of what an intended musical message might be, whether such intentions are verbalised or, as is usual, just musically conceived. Of course, an intended musical message (or object), however inspired, doesn't drop magically out of the blue. As the arrows on the left edge of Figure 5-See Musical communication model in a socio-cultural framework indicate, they are informed by conventions existing in the sociocultural field, including its store of symbols, which in their turn are informed by previous acts of semiosis involving transmitters, receivers and the sociocultural field.
• Thanks to Figure 5-See Ethnocentric selection of connotative spheres (`feels'/`moods'), there is now a little meat on the bone of intention, which we'll follow from transmitter to receiver. Does the music actually sound as intended? If so, does it physically reach receivers? If it does, what happens when they hear it? Is the message interpreted or used as intended or in a different way? We'll start with the latter, taking as examples the first `feel' in Figure 5-See Ethnocentric selection of connotative spheres (`feels'/`moods').

A typically `adequate response' would probably come into play if, in the case of intended kick-ass , rock concert-goers reacted by gesticulating enthusiastically, perhaps also joining in by yelling out the hook line of the chorus. Stage diving would be good at a speed metal gig and brandishing a cigarette lighter appropriate for a rock ballad. Such activity would, however, not constitute `adequate response' at a string quartet recital: listening in silence and without visible expression, not clapping between movements but giving the musicians a round of applause after the performance would be more appropriate. If people sit in expressionless silence during the intended kick-ass rock or if they bop around loudly to the existential Angst or ethereal sublimity of a late Beethoven quartet, or if they hear something intended as delicate and tender in terms of sentimental tack, or something intended as interesting in terms of horror, then there has been a breakdown in musical communication.160 In these cases, musicians have to ask themselves what went wrong. It's not much use for composers to moan `they just don't understand my work', because that implies, arrogantly and erroneously, that a breakdown in musical communication is solely due to malfunction at the reception end of the process.

Of course, with live performance there can be difficulties with the actual venue. Are its acoustics problematic? Is there disturbing background noise? Can't careful miking, mixing, equalising or speaker placement help? Did the violins have to work too hard to make their notes last in a dead acoustic space? If such problems aren't solved, some of the intended message (object) won't even make it into the `channel' (the signs, the sounds that you, as transmitter, want to be heard), let alone reach the receivers (your audience) so that they can form their interpretants. However, --and more likely-- maybe your performance or recording sounds fine to you but the message still doesn't seem to get across. Is it the wrong audience for your music or, more pertinently, did you make the wrong music for them? Perhaps they laugh when they should cry, or gape apathetically instead of shouting and jumping? Such problems of musical communication are attributable to what I call codal incompetence and codal interference.

Now, incompetence and interference both sound quite negative but neither term is intended in any pejorative sense. The two words are just shorthand for two types of breakdown in a synchronic musical communication situation. Neither the `incompetence' nor the `interference' imply any stupidity or malice on the part of the transmitter or receiver. Each concept simply highlights a particular set of mechanisms causing the varying degrees of difference that inevitably arise between, in semiotic terms, object and interpretant or, in terms of intentional communication, between intended and interpreted message. Codal incom-petence and codal interference are in fact essential to the renegotiation of music's possible meanings and to its survival as a sign system capable of adapting to different functions for different individuals in different populations at different times and in different places.

Codal incompetence

For musical communication to work, transmitter and receiver need access to the same basic store of signs, by which I mean a common vocabulary of musical sounds and norms. If the two parties don't share a common store of signs, codal incompetence will arise, at either the transmitting or receiving end of the message, or at both ends.

Imagine, as a Westerner, listening to a field recording of traditional music from a village community in East Africa and thinking `this sounds festive'. Then you read the CD inlay and discover the song isn't festive at all, at least if the notes written by a reputed ethnomusicologist are to be trusted. She describes the singing as `strident', explaining that the track you're hearing consists largely of stylised hyena calls and that packs of hyenas regularly ravage the villagers' cattle. Whoops! Codal incompetence is at work here on several fronts. Firstly, you heard no hyenas in the music whereas, reportedly, those making or dancing to the music did so at the time of the recording. Secondly, you may not have even known what a hyena sounds like,[ X 00] let alone what cultural conventions determine which aspects of hyena calls are stylised in which way into which types of song. Furthermore, you are unlikely to know how hyenas are regarded in the music's original cultural context. Did you hear the threat to your livelihood that the calls of those hyenas connote or did the imitations of those animals `laughing' make you want to laugh, too? Clearly, strident , rather than festive , would be an appropriate attitude for the villagers to adopt if, as you learn from the introduction to the CD inlay notes, courage, energy, organisation and determination are needed to effectively combat ravaging packs of hyenas. Mistaking strident for festive may be less inaccurate than hearing the music as mournful or gentle but codal incompetence on your part as listener is in clear evidence because you didn't hear the music in the same way as would a member of the community producing and using those sounds. None of this means that your festive and no hyenas response is `wrong'. Codal incompetence at the receiving end just means an `inadequate response' in terms of the music's original cultural setting, functions and intentions. Besides, codal incompetence is in no way a trait exclusive to musical reception, as the next example suggests.

In the early 1990s someone in Liverpool informally asked me to come up with theme tune ideas for a series of local TV programmes. I understood the series was to include a fair amount of populist nostalgia for the `good old days' when `ordinary people' were supposed to have enjoyed themselves in `simple honest ways'. Having just returned to the UK after living in Sweden for many years, I had learnt to associate that kind of nostalgia with Swedish gammaldans,161 a cheery type of old-time, proletarian fun-and-games dance music featuring the accordion. Now, if, on that basis, I'd mixed some gammaldans into a signature tune to promote some that populist nostalgia for the `good old days', I would have exhibited codal incompetence, because Liverpool listeners would not have known what to make of those sounds and of their specifically Swedish connotations. So, perhaps my local theme tune would be less codally incompetent if I tried to emulate the sound of the older popular artists from Merseyside, maybe a Searchers pastiche to take viewers back to the city in the sixties. The problem with that idea was that it too was likely to fall on deaf ears because younger Liverpudlians might not even recognise a Searchers sound, let alone be familiar with its connotations. In this latter case, however, there would also have been some codal incompetence from the receiving end, since the young audience would be unable to interpret musical signs that would be quite meaningful to older Liverpudlians. Thankfully, none these ideas saw the light of day, not so much because of my codal incompetence as because the TV project never passed the stage of loose chat in a pub.

Codal incompetence can also occur at more basic levels of musical structuration. For example, if you listen to archive recordings of Bulgarian women singing traditional harvest songs [ X 00], you'll hear a lot of semitone `clashes' similar to those often used to help create tension in film music. The women's penchant for singing two different notes a semitone apart at the same time may sound harsh and discordant to many of us the first time we hear that sound --at best it will probably come across as different, exciting or exotic. Of course, to the Bulgarian harvest singers themselves (see Figure 5-See A: Women singing harvest songs in rural Bulgaria (LP Musik från Bulgarien, 1969) B: Canadian office Christmas party (2006, anon. from internet) .A) there is nothing bizarre or exotic about their own music and, judging from their smiles, the cheerful, collaborative and celebratory aspect of the harvest songs is in clear evidence, semitone dissonances notwithstanding. It would, in short, be codally incompetent, from the receiving end, to apply the semiotic conventions of Western horror film music to Bulgarian women singing traditional harvest songs.

A: Women singing harvest songs in rural Bulgaria
(LP Musik från Bulgarien, 1969)
B: Canadian office Christmas party (2006, anon. from internet) .

It would also be codally incompetent, from the transmitting end, to use the semitone dissonances of traditional Bulgarian harvest songs to celebrate the Christmas break at an office party in Milan or Milwaukee (Figure 5-See A: Women singing harvest songs in rural Bulgaria (LP Musik från Bulgarien, 1969) B: Canadian office Christmas party (2006, anon. from internet) .B), that is unless a disproportionate number of `world music' fans are among the party-goers. In that case Bulgarian semitones might work well as group identity marker of sociocultural difference. With these `ethno' fans and their radical recontextualisation of the Bulgarian women's vocal techniques, we would be dealing not so much with codal incompetence as with codal interference.

Codal interference

Codal incompetence arises, as we just saw, when transmitter and receiver do not share the same store of musical signs, when the same musical sound, as sign, stands for different things at the transmitting and receiving ends of the communication process. Codal interference, on the other hand, arises when transmitter and receiver do share the same basic vocabulary of musical signs but differ in terms of sociocultural norms. Codal interference means that the intended sounds get across and are basically understood but that `adequate response' is obstructed by other factors, such as receivers' general like or dislike of the music and of what they think it represents. It can also result from visual, verbal, social or ideological recontextualisation of the music.

For purposes of illustration let's go back to kick-ass rock from the 1980s. Those that hated the sounds of heavy metal and attacked the music's lyrics and lifestyle did not necessarily fail to understand the music's message as you or I did with the East African hyenas (p. See Imagine, as a Westerner). No, metal haters were codally competent enough to register that the music was loud and powerful, that its lead singers tended to yell, that it made its listeners head bang, extend their arms in huge V-signs and so on. Indeed, heavy metal protagonists (soloists) had to be loudmouthed or loud-gestured because the backing they set themselves to be heard above, just like the society they and their audience inhabited, would otherwise have drowned them. They would, so to speak, have disappeared inaudibly and invisibly into an amorphous mass of sound and society.162

Metal haters, just like its fans, knew that nice guys and good girls, with a well-mannered, reserved and demure behavioural strategy for social success, were incompatible with an aesthetic demanding a studied type of vulgarity, lavish amounts of ego projection and high volume to make the music work. Codal interference would obviously arise if you had invested time and energy into cultivating a nice-guy or good-girl identity and little or none into nourishing the self-celebratory parts of your being. Metal aesthetics would be intolerable to you, not so much because the music seemed to spit on the nice guys and good girls as because you'd worked hard at repressing that anarchistic loudmouth and garish slob inside you which, if let loose, might ruin your efforts to please those in authority and to acquire social power and approval. You will have understood the music only too well but your sociocultural norms and motivations would almost certainly have been antagonistically opposed to the expression of cathartic disgust, desperation or self-celebration that the music could have given you if you'd wanted.

Codal interference can work in the opposite direction if you think of metal, hardcore, techno, gangsta or industrial fans incapable of deriving any enjoyment from a classical string quartet. The small but effective means of expression associated with classical chamber music can easily become a taboo area of affective and gestural activity for those who experience alienation at school, those whose peer group enthusiasm and social restlessness gets them thrown out of class, those who hate having to buckle under, learn the recorder or sing in the school choir, or who just resent all the goody-goody pupils and teachers who seem to love classical music so much. It is no wonder if individuals feeling such alienation do not embrace music involving, among other expressive features, qualities like delicacy, control and containment. Still, just like the good guys and nice girls who repress the happy heavy metal exhibitionist parts of their being, our alienated metal, techno and rap fans who hate classical string quartets also miss out on essential aspects of music's semiotically emotional richness.

If social and psychological fear or resentment of certain music and what it is heard as representing interfere with the communication of intended musical messages, deep identification with a certain music can do the same in reverse. In 1972, for example, the Strawbs, a politically conservative English band, recorded a tune called Union Man in which they parodied a trade union member in the lyrics and a proletarian pub or music-hall singalong `feel' in the music: they intended to ridicule political views, people and music they did not like. Unfortunately for the Strawbs, but fortunately for socialists in the UK, the British left loved Union Man and adopted it as their own anthem on picket lines. Codal interference arose in this instance because of diametrically opposed political views and divergence of cultural identity between transmitter and receiver. It is also clear that codal interference is in this instance related to codal incompetence because The Strawbs had radically misunderstood the British record-buying public's store of signs.

• Sometimes the words of a song can interfere with your perception of it as music. For example, if you had sung the well-known Welsh hymn tune Cwm Rhondda with its original words `Guide me, O thou great Jehovah!' for twenty years in the local Methodist chapel and then, for the first time, heard lager louts sing it with lewd lyrics as you walked past the pub one night, it is doubtful whether you would ever sing or feel the tune in the same way ever again. Similarly, visual narrative can also interfere with musical message, as so often happens with the use in TV ads of music you know from before. You only need think of the start of Richard Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra in ads for fabric softeners, office machinery [ 00] and mobile phones, or of Dvorák's New World Symphony for sliced bread, or of Muddy Waters' Hoochy Coochy Man for jeans worn by young white US males.163
• Codal interference works in two ways with these TV ads. First, if you knew the music before seeing the ad, the connotations and context of those previous hearing[s] will be challenged, interfered with, just as the lewd lager-lout words interfered with your previously established understanding of the Methodist hymn tune. Given your prior knowledge of the music, it is possible that the commercial message may put you off the product advertised because it uses music in a very different way to how you interpret it. In cases like this, advertising zeal to sell by associating product with assumed musical values can have the opposite effect, while, conversely, your prior knowledge of the music interferes with an `adequate response' to the advertisers' intended sales pitch. Second, if, on the other hand, you didn't know the music before seeing the advert and then heard the music at a concert or on the radio, you would probably think of the advert you saw earlier. In this case, the music`s paramusical accompaniment (visual, verbal) in the ad won't necessarily interfere with your perception of the music because you never heard it before without visuals or voiceover. It will, however, certainly conflict with types of semiosis relevant to hearing the same music without such accompaniment, or in a different paramusical context, because you just can't get the previously established paramusical connotations of the ad out of your head. Codal interference is certainly intentional in the advertising examples just given, the whole idea being that consumers associate the music, previously intended for, and used under, other circumstances, with the product being marketed: it's a form of connotative hijacking.164
• Sometimes these intentional codal interferences, including connotative hijacking, serve their purpose, as do the adverts just mentioned, or Joe Hill's parodies of Salvation Army hymns to union lyrics, or the Sousa march which became the Monty Python theme tune.165 Still, sometimes intended interference doesn't work, as we just saw with the Strawbs' Union Man (p. See If social and psychological fear or resentment of certain music , and sometimes it only half works, as in the next and final example, drawn once again from personal experience.

In 1981, Swedish Radio asked me to provide theme music for a programme series for and about immigrants. The programme's title, Jag vill leva, jag vill dö i Norden (=`I want to live and die in the North', i.e. in a Nordic country), is the last line of the Swedish national anthem and provided a useful starting point. Since Sweden was the host nation into whose established majority culture immigrants had to assimilate, I decided to start with a full-blown, grandiose, official-sounding version of the national anthem's last line. Of course, my budget couldn't pay for a symphony orchestra or a decent brass band, so I settled for recording the line myself on full organ in a local church. In fact, that may have been a better solution because end-of-year school ceremonies in Sweden are often held in churches and are quite a nationalistic affair. OK, the official national ceremony organ sound took care of the powerful host-nation side of the story but the series was not supposed to be a nationalist PR stunt, so I also needed to reflect something of the conflicts and problems of immigrant life.

Incidentally, when describing my intentions here, I am retrospectively verbalising mainly musical concepts and `feels' that constituted the object of the recording which became the sign. It was really only when codal interference affected the relationship between my object and the producer's final interpretants that I had to start rationalising, in verbal terms, what I had done musically.

I put the first aspect of immigrant problems into music by replacing the grand final chord of the national anthem with a slightly disturbing sonority. I quickly faded that worry chord to a much lower volume that could be held throughout the rest of the signature to allow solo `immigrant instruments' to play the same melodic phrase (the last line of the Swedish national anthem) at different points in different keys and at different pitches. The first `out-of-key individual immigrant' to play the national anthem was a dirty-sounding electric guitar which I included for two reasons: [1] I was not the only rock-playing English-speaking immigrant in the country; [2] rock music was in 1981 itself fast becoming an integral part of the host nation's mainstream culture. After the rock guitar I added accordion (Swedish and immigrant again) in another different key and then mandolin as a generic `ethnic folk lute' to suggest Sweden's numerous Greek (bouzouki), Turkish (saz), Eastern European (balalaika/cimbalon etc.) and Andean (charango) immigrants (instruments). The last `out-of-key ethnic instrument' representation was soprano recorder as `generic folk flute' --perhaps an Andean quena or a West Asian ney/näi/gagri. The final flute note was left loud, high, piercing, alone and long enough, with extra reverb, so it could be easily cross-faded into the speaker's introductory words.

• Those twenty-odd seconds of theme music were not without humour but I also wanted them to sound a bit disconcerting. Why? Well, as an immigrant in a majority host culture, you try to fit in and to `sing from the same hymn sheet' as the majority, but you often get the feeling that you'll always be somehow out of step, out of sync, out of tune and out of place because, like it or not, you think, feel, act, look or sound different to the host-nation majority. Since it was part of that experience that needed to be in those twenty seconds of music, I thought it would be effective to juxtapose musical soundbytes that didn't normally belong together in the same piece: I was in other words intentionally using codal interference. Hence the official-sounding festive pomp of the organ plus the worry chord, plus each individual and timbrally distinct instrument representing a different culture. All those elements were supposed to interfere, like immigrants, with the first and most powerful statement on the organ. X 00

The recording engineer and I made numerous mixes of the multitrack recording. Apart from the full mix, there was one without the organ, another without the distorted guitar, a third with neither organ nor guitar, and so on. The only mix the producer liked was the one with just dubbed mandolin. She even made us dump the flute because it was `too shrill'. Surprised at her reaction, I tried to explain why I had gone to the trouble of recording a separate organ track outside the studio but the organ and guitar were not acceptable, I understood, because they didn't sound like immigrants. `But I'm an immigrant, too, and Sweden is the country we come to', I objected `so Sweden has to be in there because you can't be an immigrant or feel like one if there's no host culture.' To cut a long story short, the only concession granted by the producer was that, after much insistence from my side, the worry chord could be held under the dubbed mandolin parts. It is that version which was finally used as programme signature. I could content myself with the fact that there was at least a slight musical hint that being an immigrant might have its problems. X 00

My interpretation of the producer's selection of just one element and her rejection of all the others is not that it was simply a matter of `personal taste'. She seemed to me to be saying that flutes can be cute or exotic, not strident, in the same way that host nations appreciate grateful and deferential immigrants who are never angry, alienated or frustrated. She also seemed to be saying that immigrants could not be English-speaking and not electric (so much for yours truly and hundreds of Vietnam draft dodgers in Sweden at the time). It was as if, in her mind, we should all conform to the host-nation immigrant stereotype that assumes we all come from far-off and backward rural areas where we all play pleasantly unfamiliar music on pleasantly unfamiliar acoustic instruments. The strangest thing was, however, that the signature theme should not allude to the overriding power of the host nation as a central issue affecting the lives of immigrants.

• This little signature theme story illustrates codal interference on a grand scale. The producer knew as well as I did the values, attitudes and feelings encoded in the `channel'. However, although we probably both had access to a very similar store of signs, our sociocultural norms and expectations were in definite conflict. She did not think my musical view of being an immigrant was suitable and, as an immigrant, I thought hers was both unrealistic and unsympathetic.
• Of course, the producer had the final word and, who knows, she may have been right. Maybe she saw me as a codally incompetent transmitter, as an unreliable or unprofessional young composer who `didn't come up with the goods'. Perhaps I was supposed to produce something happier and more catchy, something that would just acoustically identify the programme and put potential listeners in a no problems frame of mind. However, since the only information I was given about the programme dealt with its content, I assumed that I was to focus on that. If, on the other hand, my job was to provide an innocuous musical identifier and to prevent listeners from switching channels, I should have been told so, or was I expected to read that between the lines?
• Whatever the case may be, it is very possible that another communication problem caused the codal interference just described. That problem relates to the task of formulating an adequate brief, i.e. the instructions given to a musician or composer by someone who is usually not. Those difficulties are, in their turn, one reason for writing this book. The fact that muso and non-muso discourse about music differ so radically, for all the reasons given in Chapters 2-4, calls for the development of models and of a terminology allowing musos and non-musos to better understand each other.

Sonic anaphones

• A sonic anaphone can be thought of as the quasi-programmatic, `onomatopoeic' stylisation of `non-musical' sound, e.g. Schubert's babbling brooks, Baroque opera thunder, William Byrd's bells or Jimi Hendrix's B52. As Rösing (1977) points out, sonograms of Schubert's brooks or of Beethoven's Pastorale Symphony thunder bear little objective acoustic relationship to sonograms of the `real' things those musical stylisations are supposed to represent. But, continues Rösing, this is hardly the point, since the structural homologies between `real' and `musical' brooks or between `real' and `musical' thunder stem partly from cultural convention, partly from the state of development in sound technology. This dual mechanism explains why Vangelis's sampled rain sounds far more like rain than Beethoven's and why I couldn't hear the jackal in Masai music supposed to include sonic-anaphonic allusion to the cry of that animal.
• But anaphones are not only sonic; they can also act as structural homologies of movement and touch. These sign types are simply called (b) kinetic and (c) tactile anaphones.

Kinetic anaphones

• Kinetic anaphones have to do with the relationship of the human body to time and space. Such movement can be literally visualised as that of a human or humans riding, driving, flying, walking, running, strolling, etc. through, round, across, over, to and fro, up and down, in relation to a particular environment or from one environment to another. Gallops, marches, promenades, walking basses, struts, cakewalks etc. all contain culturally stylised kinetic anaphones for certain types of human bodily movements. However, kinetic anaphones can also be visualised as the movement of animals (e.g. flights of bumble bees, swarms of locusts, stampedes of cattle) or objects (e.g. rocket launches, truck driving, trains moving, B52s bombing, spinning wheels) or as the subjectivised movement of objectively stationary objects or beings, e.g. the sort of movement the human hand makes when outlining rolling hills (pastoral undulation), gentle waves on the sea, quadratic skyscrapers, jagged rocks, etc. Even stillness can be expressed by kinetic anaphone through the very lack of explicit metronomic time in relation to the regular beats of the heart, the regular periodicity of breathing, etc. (e.g. open landscapes like the start of Borodin's On the Steppes of Central Asia, the end of Mussorgsky's Night on a Bare Mountain, `On the Open Prairie' from Copland's ballet suite Billy the Kid).
• Of course, since the perception of any sound requires the positioning or movement of a body or bodies in relation to another or others, many sonic anaphones are also kinetic (e.g. a `motor bike' fuzzed guitar panned from one side to another, `horse hoof' clip-clops in 2/4 or 6/8 gallop metre). Similarly, some kinetic or sonic anaphones can also be tactile.

Tactile anaphones

• The most familiar example of tactile anaphones is that produced by slowly moving, romantic string underscores -- `string pads', as the sound is called on synthesizers, because it pads holes and spaces in the sonic texture. Such string wallpaper, performed of course by several stringed instruments, rarely solo, can be characterised by its lack of audible attack and decay and by the relative consistency of its envelope -- a parameter listing of synthesizer string presets reveals this in digital detail --, all frequently enhanced by extra reverb in recording. All this can produce the effect of homogeneous, thick, rich, viscous sonic texture and, by haptic synaesthesia, sensations of luxury, comfort and smoothness. This observation can be substantiated by noting nomenclature and in-house descriptions of mood music featuring thick (`rich', `lush') string scoring of phenomenologically non-dissonant sonorities (tactile-kinetic connotations underlined): 167
• Lullaby Of The City -- home, soft and velvety, gently flowing, quiet, intimate and restful
• Penthouse Affair -- fashions, sweetly melodic, slightly nostalgic but sophisticated, `dressed in silk and satin'
• Amethysts for Esmeralda -- rich and dreamy;
• Girl In Blue -- lush, smooth melody;
• Valse Anastasie -- romantic, lush;
• Sequence for Sentimentalists -- rich, romantic theme.
• Viscous string pads have indeed acted and still act as sonic emulsifiers in many a voluptuous Hollywood love scene and no further documentation should be necessary to prove the point. 4
• Finally, music example 00 presents an anaphone that is at the same time sonic, kinetic and tactile: the sonic anaphone is that of either a knife being sharpened or a repeated scream, the kinetic anaphone that of repeated, deliberate, regular movement (Norman Bates's multiple stabbing of Marion in the shower) while the tactile aspect is sharp, unpleasant and piercing, the glissando acciacature connotable with the initial resistance offered by the skin as the knife point plunges into the body).

Part for whole

• The second main category of musical signs is the genre synecdoche. In verbal language, a synecdoche denotes a figure of speech in which a part substitutes the whole, as in the expression `all hands on deck', implying, at least from the captain's view, that the sailors' brawn is worth more than their brain. A musical synecdoche would therefore be a set of musical structures inside a given musical style that refer to another (different, `foreign', `alien') musical style by citing one or two elements supposed to be typical of that `other' style when heard in the context of the style into which those `foreign' elements are imported. By citing part of the other style, the citation then alludes not only to that other style in its entirety but also potentially refers to the complete genre of which that other musical style is a subset -- and here I am using `genre' and `style' in the precise senses defined by Franco Fabbri (1982).
• Herrmann's shower murder music from Psycho, played in a concert or radio context to popular music listeners who did not recognise the piece, might well be perceivable as a genre synecdoche: since it bears greater structural resemblance to Penderecki than to Abba or Brian Adams, it might say `modern atonal music' (style reference) and thereby `difficult, serious problems, intellectual Angst' rather than (anaphonically) `murder by multiple stabbing' in a popular horror movie. However, a less ambiguous genre synecdoche is provided by all those bass pedal points with simple tunes in compound time from Baroque works. This museme stack, anomalous in the harmonic and rhythmic perpetuum mobile of the Baroque, was obviously deemed an adequate connotor of central European country music of the time (style reference) and thereby of the presumedly idyllic pastorality as shepherds in the field keeping watch over their flocks (genre synecdoche). The `pastoral symphonies' in Händel's Messiah or J.S. Bach's Christmas Oratorio bear witness to this sort of musical sign type. The genre synecdoche has, in other words, like the anaphone, a paramusical field of connotation. However, unlike the anaphone, the genre synecdoche connotes that field, not by direct synaesthetic or structural homology, but by the intermediary of another musical style. The example of Baroque `pastoral' music shows how the `home style' (perpetuum mobile, changing harmony, circle-of-fifths progressions, etc.) inserts elements from a `foreign style' (drones and simple one-key tunes, etc.) as a reference to phenomena presumed by the `home style's' audience to be associated with that `foreign style'. Since the intermediate `foreign' style is only one part of a larger set of cultural constructs (way of life, attitudes, perceived environment, clothing, behaviour, etc.) viewed by the `home style's' audience, the `foreign style' acts as synecdoche for that larger set. As stated earlier, genre synecdoches contain two stages of reference: from certain elements in a `foreign' musical style to the totality of that style and from that style to the rest of the culture to which that `foreign' style belongs.
• Psycho Shower Music

Short one-way processes

• The third type of musical sign is the episodic marker. Episodic markers, 168 like all the sign types presented so far, had to be constructed as a typological concept because of intrinsic differences is musical semiosis observed in conjunction with empirical data from a reception test carried out on several hundred respondents in the early eighties. There is no time to account for that work here, save to say that some pieces of stereotypic but unknown music used as test battery for eliciting film or TV scenarios gave rise to far more episodic associations than others. In other words, some pieces elicited lots of associations like `has just', `after that', `after a long time', `about to happen', `leading to', etc., while other pieces gave rise to no such episodic connotations. Common musical-structural denominators of these apparently more episodic pieces were short, unidirectional processes along at least one parameter of musical expression, such as short, quick upbeat, up-bow, initial, rising run-ins (αναβασις) to new musical material (e.g. the violin run-up in Rota's theme for Romeo and Juliet). Such episodic markers, be they propulsive repetitions like six-quaver upbeat to the chorus of Abba's Fernando or the centrifugal melodic swirls at the start of Johann Strauss's Fledermaus waltz (Il pipistrello), or accelerandi or ritardandi or crescendi or diminuendi, all serve one purpose. As long as they do not continue forever and as long as they are not immediately annulled by a musical process in the opposite direction along the same parameter(s) of musical expression, all such episodic markers act as anacruses, pointing the musical narrative in the direction of something new, be it a new theme or a new section, or even the final chord or note, which is, at least in an intra-opus sense, always new, because it can logically only happen once.

Compositional norms

• The fourth and final type of musical sign is the style indicator. A style indicator is any musical structure or set of musical structures that are either constant for or regarded as typical of the `home' musical style by persons in a culture sporting at least two different musical styles. We are in other words talking about the compositional norms of any given style. Thus, music using only a very few chords (rarely inverted) but sporting plenty of vocal and instrumental inflection (of particular types) might be regarded as style indicators of blues rather than of Viennese classicism, whereas plenty of different chords, frequently inverted, and very little vocal or instrumental inflection might be regarded as indicating Viennese classicism rather than blues. Style indicators can, it should be added, be used by `foreign' musical styles as genre synecdoches. For example, although the steel guitar sound of Country and Western music acts frequently as a indicator of the `country' genre, it started its life inside that style as a style reference to the Hawaiian guitar, i.e. as genre synecdoche for something exotic. Such incorporation of `foreign' elements into a `home' style is of course part and parcel of musical acculturation, but it useful to note this distinction, since the same musical element might connote something quite different to different (groups of) people at different points in time and place.

Intersubjectivity

• Recurrent observations about what occurs simultaneously with music (see Parameters of paramusical expression, chapter 8): words, actions, images, scenarios, responses. Socially objective! Problems setting up reliable test situations. Paramusical fields of connotation linked directly to analysis object

Interobjectivity

• Use music as a metalanguage for music. One piece resembles/sounds like another, makes you think of another. Produce list of pieces resembling analysis object. Interobjective comparison as intertextual procedure.
• Problems to solve.
• 1. How to identify/denote a particular sound or set of sounds?
• Use digital counter on your CD player, iPod or file-playing software. Unequivocal and exact sonic source reference.
• 2. How to collect IOCM?
• If you can't find anything in your own head after racking your brain for hours, ask other. If they can't find anything, ask a musician! Good research means knowing how to find answers, not knowing answers yourself in advance! Tactile/kinetic memory like memorising patterns of mvt for your cash machine PIN number or phone numbers. Give me an octave! Transcription gestures from cellists, guitarists, pianists.
• With list of IOCM, ask what PMFCs they have in common.
• Watch out for false friends (same structure, different meaning)! Examples.
• With IOCMs and their PMFCs, valid hypothesis that whatever the AO and the IOCMs have in common by way of structure also involves common denominators of PMFC.

Ambitus, compass.

Contour (e.g. ascending, descending, terraced).

Tonal vocabulary (i.e. scale, mode, etc.).

Harmonic parameters.

Tonal centre (if any).

Type of tonality (if any), e.g. modal, diatonic, quartal, drone, bebop, impressionist, late romantic, twelve-tone, etc. Also alterations, inversions, suspensions, resolutions, etc.

Harmonic change as long and short term phenomenon, incl. harmonic rhythm (see 3.8) and thematic order (see 3.3).

1. Dynamics parameters

Loud ↔ soft.

Sudden ↔ gradual.

Constant ↔ variable.

•  
• Timbre conference notes
•  
•  

`Are you talking to me?': Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver (1976)

• It takes De Niro less than two seconds to say the line and he pauses over two seconds between each time he does so (0:30, 0:34, 0:38). Leaving aside gesture, posture and facial expression for the moment and concentrating solely on the sound of De Niro's voice, minor differences of inflection, intonation, volume and accentuation can be discerned. The first time he asks the question (0:30) his voice is low-key but quite rapid with the quick but substantial rise of pitch normally used in English to questions expecting the answer `yes' or `no', but it does sound a little bit sudden, as if he had been taken off guard. The second utterance (0:34) is slightly slower, a little more deliberate and has clearer diction, suggesting that the imaginary low-life interlocutor may not have heard Travis the first time. The third utterance (0:38) is once again quite low-key but includes slightly more emphasis on `me' and a little less on `talking', this shift in accentuation underlining his personal involvement in the imagined encounter. Apart from these minor variants, it should be noted that De Niro does not raise (the volume of) his voice in anger or frustration, and that his is the normal voice of a young, probably white, North American, English-speaking male. In fact, without the narrative context and without De Niro's body language, there is nothing remarkable about his vocal persona in this scene any more than Travis himself is supposed to be a remarkable personality, even though his distinct lack of charisma may be what makes him narratively interesting.
• Given that this relatively normal, neutral and uncharismatic personality has a correspondingly normal, neutral and uncharismatic vocal persona, it ought to be possible to replace his voice with others in order to understand how certain vocal elements are compatible or incompatible with other simultaneous aspects of non-verbal communication. We'll deal first with the latter in the Taxi Driver mirror scene, referring to clip 00 -- The Vocal Persona Commutations (see Table 9-See Vocal Persona Commutations: Are You Talking to Me? Clip timings at http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=OL7uc6L5nMQ TD = Taxi Driver, p. See Vocal Persona Commutations: Are You Talking to Me? Clip timings at http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=OL7uc6L5nMQ TD = Taxi Driver).
• The fact that we're in quite a noisy and untidy kitchen and that the young man is white, unshaven and wearing what appears to be an grey flannel or denim air-force jacket tells us quite a lot. It rules out vocal personae who are children (6:20, 6:25, 7:15), women, old men, African-American-sounding or from the higher echelons of society (4:05), unless they're slumming it, of course. It also rules out robots (3:03), death-metal monsters (3:40), chipmunks (6:25) or anything else that doesn't look --or sound-- like a Caucasian male, between 25 and 50 years of age and a member of the popular classes.173 But there is more in the visuals (0:30-0:45) that narrows down the vocal commutation possibilities.
• Since De Niro is about one metre away from the camera, alternative voiceovers cannot sound too close (3:17, 3:57) or too far away (6:40). For example, the `repugnant intimacy' of the lecherous voice (3:17) only works if De Niro's face is in extreme close-up (3:30, 6:50). Obviously, then, one element of vocal persona is its perceived proximity. Another element is acoustic space: the `monster', `big guy' and `evil god' voices, for instance (3:40, 6:16, 6:59), have all been given generous amounts of reverb incompatible with Travis's kitchen.

Vocal Persona Commutations: Are You Talking to Me?
Clip timings at http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=OL7uc6L5nMQ
TD = Taxi Driver

Timing	Visuals	Voice
0:00	Logos and titles	robot (repeated)
0:30	TD (=Taxi Driver)	original (∞3)
0:52	TD, comments	original (∞3∞3)
1:35	TD	Dad talking to baby (∞3)
1:57	TD, comments	Dad talking to baby (∞3∞3 )
2:30	Webcam	Commentator (on baby talk)
3:03	TD, comments	Robot
3:17	TD, comments, close-up	Lecherous (repugnant intimacy)
3:40	TD, comments	Monsters (English, German)
3:57	TD, comments	Pathetic, despondent (∞4)
4:05	TD, comments	Posh Southern UK (∞4)
4:32	TD, comments	Regular Southern UK (∞5)
4:49	TD, comments	Disbelief/ridicule (∞5)
5:06	comments	Commentator
5:45	TD	original (∞2)
5:51	TD, comments	`It's tacky to be' [or not to be] (∞2);
5:56	TD, comments	`Då tar det väl vi.' (∞3);
6:02	TD, comments	`Are you watching TV?' (∞2)
6:03	TD, comments	`Distracting a bee.' (∞2)
6:08	TD, comments	`J'suis bien ton ami' (∞2)
6:14	comments	Original ∞2;
6:16	comments comments	Surprised/indignant; Big guy, big reverb
6:20	comments	Kiddy robot; Posh Southern UK
6:25	comments comments	chipmunk; exasperated (1); exasperated (2);
6:31	comments	Swedish; disbelief; normal German
6:38	end titles	Estuarian; angry robot; very quiet
6:42	end titles	Posh Southern UK; Liverpudlian
6:46	end titles	despondent; whispered; plaintive
6:50	TD, extreme close-up	lecherous
6:57	TD, inverted colours	slow kiddy robot
6:59	TD, distorted face	evil god
7:02	TD, severely distorted face	monster: `Sprichst du mit mir?'
7:06	TD, pixelated	robot, repeated
7:15	Webcam	commentator, evil child

• The first time (0:30, 0:52) Travis asks the question he is at the far right edge of the screen with his body facing screen left. He turns his head towards us, as if just having heard something coming from the direction of the camera. He looks surprised, his eyebrows are slightly raised and his head tossed back a bit. It is the look of someone literally taken aback. However, there is nothing except the immediate narrative context that rules out the possibility of pleasant surprise, which is why the first baby talk voiceover (1:35) works well if viewers imagine the camera being the baby's point of view and that the De Niro character is a proud father, suprised and delighted by his infant's happy and communicative gurgling as he walks past.
• For the second version of the question (0:34, 1:03) De Niro has half turned toward the mirror/camera, tossed his head back a bit more and raised his eyebrows higher. Once again, it is mainly the narrative context that rules out a possibly positive interpretation of Travis's body language and which lead us to believe that this more clearly `taken aback' posture is more likely to express affront and irritation than surprised delight. Even his teeth, visible for a short moment in an unsmiling mouth, may suggest an attitude of confrontation. Moreover, he seems to be `looking down his nose' at his imagined interlocutor, and since his diction and accentuation are slightly more forceful than before, the baby talk voiceover of the delighted dad is less convincing here. Furthermore, the despondent, depressed and weak voiceovers (3:57, 6:46) align badly with De Niro's posture, facial expression, accentuation and diction during these three seconds.
• The third version (0:38, 1:25) is gesturally the clearest. His body is turned a little more towards us (the camera/mirror/imagined interlocutor), as he points to his own chest in sync with `to me'. Yet again, prior knowledge of Travis's character and story will most likely lead viewers to interpret his grin as insolent, and his hand gesture as expressing personal affront. However, without such prior knowledge and with the addition of a few sonic correctives to the narrative (baby gurgling, mother going `aaah!', as in `how cute!'), are you talking to me?, spoken by a personally delighted and surprised father, aligns quite convincingly with this third version of the famous question (c. 1:50, 2:20).
• Several vocal persona commutations do not work because of problems with lip sync (synchronisation). For example, stereotypical robot voices (3:03) tend to apply equal durations for each syllable --a non-human speaking trait if ever there was--, while depressed and despondent statements (3:57) are much slower than the rate at which De Niro delivers Travis's famous question in a normal speaking voice. Similarly, whispering and other types of vocal close-up are incompatible not only with the lack of visual close-up in the Taxi Driver sequence but also with its speed of delivery: whispering has to be slower than talking because it has to compensate for its lack of voiced consonants and clear vowel sounds, while many types of intimate statement are unsuitable if delivered in a rapid tempo (e.g. `I love you' at breakneck speed).