Semiotics Institute Online

Contents Reading Other References Contact Lectures This series of lectures provides an introduction to the communicative use of sound, and music drawing mainly on social semiotic theories and models along with others from linguistics, the sociology of music and sound and from multimodality. Lectures introduce tools for analysing how we can use sound to communicate [...]

Course Description Contents Course Description Lectures Gesture is movement that may be interpreted as significant. Musical gesture presents more challenging problems, since it must often be inferred from notation and an understanding of performance practice and style. These lectures will assume much of the historical argument and concentrate instead on semiotic and speculative theoretical approaches [...]

This course attempts to provide a theoretical and practical basis for understanding music as a form of interhuman communication. Such an attempt, however modest, is, I would argue, of considerable use at a time and in a culture whose omnipresent and ubiquitous audiovisual media disseminate ‘messages’ relying mainly on symbolic systems (auditive and visual, with or without words) that have tended to escape the analytical eye of the largely logocentric legacy of learning in the West.

Any viable approach to understanding musical ‘meaning’ will need to address at least three theoretical ‘holy trinities’: [1] emitter/channel/receiver; [2] icon/index/arbitrary sign; [3] syntax/semantics/pragmatics. Now, conventional musicology in the West has, for reasons presented in lesson 1, traditionally concerned itself with the syntax of music in the European art music tradition —the ‘channel’ or idealised ‘music itself’— and paid only marginal attention to other musics, even less to the semantics and pragmatics of any music. This course seeks partialy to redress that imbalance.