Meaning and the Specification of Motion in Music

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The relationship between music and motion has attracted interest over a broad sweep of history and across a variety of disciplines including aesthetics, psychology, music theory and neuroscience, and the relationship itself has been regarded variously as metaphorical, semiotic, and physiological. This paper argues that the relationship between music and motion: 1) is a fundamental aspect of music's impact and meaning; 2) is significantly, but not only, concerned with self-motion (as argued by Todd); 3) should be regarded as a truly perceptual relationship – even though the motion that is perceived may be illusory (in the sense of being virtual rather than real). The aim of the paper is to clarify the nature and status of the relationship between music and motion, rejecting both the physiological reductionism of regarding it as “hardwired” and the potentially dismissive view of it as merely metaphorical. In place of these, the paper will argue for motion as being perceptually specified by the acoustical information in music.

The theory proposed here has specific empirical implications – most obviously an investigation of the various kinds of information in music that specify motion, and a consideration of whether these function in anything like the same manner as for real motion. It also has implications for theories of musical meaning, since it allows for the integration of the sense of (self-) motion with the other kinds of events (physical, structural, cultural) as they are specified in music.

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