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 [...]

Contents Introduction Author Bios Lectures Introduction In this course we introduce biosemiotics as a field of research that develops models of life processes focusing on their informational aspects. Peirce’s general concept of semiosis can be used to analyze such processes, and provide a powerful basis for understanding the emergence of meaning in living systems, by [...]

• What is the systematic nature and the historical origin of pictorial semiotics ?
• How do pictures differ from – and resemble – verbal signs ?
• What reasons are there for considering the picture to be a sign in the first place ?
• How can conventionalist theories of pictures and other iconic signs be demonstrated to be false ?
• What is the specificity of the picture sign within iconic semiosis ?
• How is pictorial meaning related to ordinary perception and to what extent can indexicality account for this relationship ?
• Can the different models for pictorial analysis account for all kinds of pictures, or are different models suitable for separate sub-categories ?
• Can visual rhetoric be amended in order to explain the relationship of pictorial meaning to the world of our experience, notably in terms of wholes and parts ?
• What is the peculiar semiotic nature of pictures depicting other pictures ?
• How are photographs — and digital pictures — different from hand-made pictures ?
• In what way do pictures function within society at large and in relation to cultures and subcultures?
• How can the history of art, notably the advent of modernism, be understood in semiotic terms?
• How are other visual signs — from the body to the landscape — different and similar to pictures ?

Course Description Contents Course Description Lectures The course is mainly expository in character. We shall be concerned with the signifying aspect of human language which is inevitably and simultaneously both natural and cultural. Broadly, we emphasize the relevance of three levels for comprehending the process of signification: the physical-biological, the linguistic-categorical, and the cultural-metaphorical. Such [...]

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.