Walk–denoting music: refining music semantics

Music has recently been argued to have a referential semantics, i.e. to trigger inferences about an extra–musical reality. In this view, because the set of possible denotations is often very large, the meaning of music is often very abstract. Here we consider a very particular kind of musical sequences, which we call walk–denoting as they strongly evoke walking–situations — namely situations in which at least one character is walking. We show that the current model for music semantics is doubly insufficient. First, it makes wrong predictions with respect to the considered musical snippets. Using the method of minimal pairs, we come up with an enhanced model that accounts for inferential differences that the previous one left aside. Second, it relies on the non–trivial assumption that all notes are interpreted as events, while alternative theories seem to be just as plausible. Because a rewriting of our prototypical musical snippet adding a quaver did not seem to affect the denotation, the possibility that some musical events denote nothing needs to be investigated. Finally, we sketch the overall theoretical landscape through two main theories, which either consider that all musical events are interpreted, or that some of them might not be.

Co-written with Léo Zaradzki
Proceedings of the 22nd Amsterdam Colloquium, Amsterdam
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