The emergence of meaning in music

Author(s)

Luis Felipe Oliveira

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: Campinas, SP.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Artes
• Defense date: 0000-00-00

Examining board members

Jônatas Manzolli; Yara Borges Caznók; Maria Eunice Quilici Gonzalez; Claudiney Rodrigues Carrasco; Itala Maria Loffredo D'Ottaviano

• Advisor: Jônatas Manzolli; Willem F.G Haselager

Abstract

This thesis intends to provide a phenomenological and semiotic model of the process of signification in music, bearing itself conceptually and theoretically on the philosophy of C.S. Peirce. The concept of meaning in music or the understanding of how music becomes meaningful involve questions that spread over the history of the philosophy of music, from ancient times to modernity, as well as they are also considered in the field of music psychology or neuroscience of music, more recently. In a sense, the perspectives about what is music and how we do understand it, about its role within the universe of human knowledge and within the metaphysical and cosmological investigations, reflect paradigmatic changes in the history of western thought. The first chapter presents a panoramic and brief view of the shifting in the understanding of music and its meanings, from three perspectives: (i) music as imitation; (ii) music as form; (iii) music as collectiveness. The second chapter goes into the area of psychology, bringing forth the theory of musical meaning proposed by Leonard Meyer. The pioneer work of Meyer on musical meaning in psychology establishes a interesting counterpoint to those views discussed in the first chapter, with a special correlation with the formalist approach of Eduard Hanslick. The third chapter goes on in investigating the process of music signification in the field of psychology, describing the theory of musical expectancy advocated by David Huron. Huron¿s theory can be taken as derived from Meyer¿s point of view on musical meaning, but it is more focused over experimental evidences and on biological and neurological aspects of anticipation. In the fourth chapter we take aside the specific question of musical meaning to launch ourselves in the instigating task of describing some aspects of the peircean thought: (i) the classification of science; (ii) the phenomenology; (iii) the logic-semiotics; (iv) the normative sciences; (v) the logic of discovery, and (vi) the pragmatism. Such incursion in the Peirce¿s thought would lead us back to the especific questions about musical meaning and signification, in the fifth chapter of this thesis. In such chapter we establish a correspondence between this peircean perspective of musical signification and those presented in the first three chapters, in logic-semiotic, normative and pragmatic terms. We also propose a correspondence of this approach with recent concepts in the studies of mind , as: (i) emergence; (ii) self-organization; (iii) creativity. In the thesis¿s finishing takes to a dialog, thus, between the peircean model of musical signification with both the the actuality of the recent researches on human cognition and the western tradition of thinking about music and its meanings (AU)