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What Is Musical Meaning? Theorizing Music As Performative U Erance
What is Musical Meaning? Theorizing Music as Performative Uerance * Andrew J. Chung NOTE: The examples for the (text-only) PDF version of this item are available online at: hp://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.19.25.1/mto.19.25.1.chung.php KEYWORDS: musical meaning, semiotics, J. L. Austin, performative uerance, speech-act theory, philosophy of language, experimental music ABSTRACT: In this article, I theorize a new conception of musical meaning, based on J. L. Austin’s theory of performative uerances in his treatise How to Do Things with Words. Austin theorizes language meaning pragmatically: he highlights the manifold ways language performs actions and is used to “do things” in praxis. Austin thereby suggests a new theoretic center for language meaning, an implication largely developed by others after his death. This article theorizes an analogous position that locates musical meaning in the use of music “to do things,” which may include performing actions such as reference and disclosure, but also includes, in a theoretically rigorous fashion, a manifold of other semiotic actions performed by music to apply pressure to its contexts of audition. I argue that while many questions have been asked about meanings of particular examples of music, a more fundamental question has not been addressed adequately: what does meaning mean? Studies of musical meaning, I argue, have systematically undertheorized the ways in which music, as interpretable uerance, can create, transform, maintain, and destroy aspects of the world in which it participates. They have largely presumed that the basic units of sense when it comes to questions of musical meaning consist of various messages, indexes, and references encoded into musical sound and signifiers. -
Review: Marcello Barbieri (Ed) (2007) Introduction to Biosemiotics. the New Biological Synthesis
tripleC 5(3): 104-109, 2007 ISSN 1726-670X http://tripleC.uti.at Review: Marcello Barbieri (Ed) (2007) Introduction to Biosemiotics. The new biological synthesis. Dordrecht: Springer Günther Witzany telos – Philosophische Praxis Vogelsangstr. 18c A-5111-Buermoos/Salzburg Austria E-mail: [email protected] 1 Thematic background without utterances we act as non-uttering indi- viduals being dependent on the discourse de- Maybe it is no chance that the discovery of the rived meaning processes of a linguistic (e.g. sci- genetic code occurred during the hot phase of entific) community. philosophy of science discourse about the role of This position marks the primary difference to language in generating models of scientific ex- the subject of knowledge of Kantian knowledge planation. The code-metaphor was introduced theories wherein one subject alone in principle parallel to other linguistic terms to denote lan- could be able to generate sentences in which it guage like features of the nucleic acid sequence generates knowledge. This abstractive fallacy molecules such as “code without commas” was ruled out in the early 50s of the last century (Francis Crick). At the same time the 30 years of being replaced by the “community of investiga- trying to establish an exact scientific language to tors” (Peirce) represented by the scientific com- delimit objective sentences from non-objective munity in which every single scientist is able the ones derived one of his peaks in the linguistic place his utterance looking for being integrated turn. in the discourse community in which his utter- ances will be proven whether they are good ar- 1.1 Changing subjects of knowledge guments or not. -
University of Copenhagen, Solvgade 83, DK 1307 Copenhagen, Denmark; E-Mail: [email protected] 488 Kalevi Kull, Jesper Hoffmeyer from Medical Science
Thure von Uexküll 1908-2004 Kull, Kalevi; Hoffmeyer, Jesper Published in: Sign Systems Studies Publication date: 2005 Document version Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Citation for published version (APA): Kull, K., & Hoffmeyer, J. (2005). Thure von Uexküll 1908-2004. Sign Systems Studies, 33(2), 487-494. Download date: 29. sep.. 2021 Sign Systems Studies 33.2, 2005 Thure von Uexküll 1908–2004 Kalevi Kull,1 Jesper Hoffmeyer2 Looking back in 2001, Thomas Sebeok (1920– 2001) emphasized how important for the forma- tion of contemporary biosemiotics had been the discussions that he, Giorgio Prodi (1929–1988) and Thure von Uexküll conducted in Freiburg in the 1970s (Sebeok 2001: 63–65). As one of these three main figures, Thure von Uexküll signifi- cantly contributed to the realignment of the se- miotic threshold (i.e., the threshold below which genuine sign action cannot properly be said to take place) from the borderline between nature and culture to the borderline separating life from non-life — thus effectively making the study of living systems a study of semiosis (Anderson et al. 1984; 1990). His writings on the development of the main concepts of biosemiotics and on the interpretation of Jakob von Uexküll’s work in relation to thereof certainly qualify as biosemiotic classics. As a physician and philosopher, he developed a semiotic approach to medicine in general and to psychosomatic medicine in parti- Fig. 1. Dr. honoris causa, cular. As a semiotician, he renewed ties with the University of Tartu, old roots of semiotics deriving (since Antiquity) Dec. 1, 1994. 1 Author’s address: Kalevi Kull, Department of Semiotics, University of Tartu, Tiigi Str. -
Music and Meaning in the 20Th Century
Towards the Semantics of Music: the 20th Century1 Mihailo Antovic Faculty of Philosophy, University of Nis, Serbia Abstract This paper discusses the problem of musical meaning from the perspective of some 20th century approaches to linguistic semantics. The text briefly covers the issue as it was viewed in the first half of the previous century, and then reviews some studies of musical meaning within the structural, generative, and cognitive frameworks. The author's opinion is that conceptual metaphor theory, in its search of the conceptualization of music, provides the most solid grounds for the foundation of a true „musico-semantics‟. Key words: language, music, meaning, semantics, cognition. he relationship between language and music has been of interest for centuries. Although T structural („grammatical‟) comparisons have occurred throughout the history of language study, and have been topical in the last twenty odd years, it is the problem of musical meaning that has been central to many theoretical discussions, most notably in the aesthetics of music. In this paper, I will try to outline the principal currents in the modern study of music and meaning, analyzing the issue in the framework of linguistic semantics. To define the problem, I will first elaborate on Bernstein‟s term „musico-linguistics‟ (Bernstein, 1976: 9) and introduce the central question related to „musico-semantics‟: does music have any meaning, and if it does, what is its nature and possible relationship to the same term as used in linguistics? The problem of musical signification emerges from the nature of musical phenomena. While music has no clear reference to extramusical reality, it does provoke psychological reactions in listeners comparable to few other arts. -
Music and Language Comprehension in the Brain
Music and Language Comprehension in the Brain © Richard Kunert 2017 Cover design: Jorrit Kiel ISBN 978-90-76203-79-9 Printed and bound by Ipskamp Drukkers b.v. The research reported in this thesis was supported by a PhD grant by the Max Planck society (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft) awarded to Richard Kunert and a Spinoza Prize by the Dutch science organization (Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek) awarded to Peter Hagoort. Music and Language Comprehension in the Brain Proefschrift ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen op gezag van de rector magnificus prof. dr. J.H.J.M. van Krieken, volgens besluit van het college van decanen in het openbaar te verdedigen op vrijdag 10 februari 2017 om 12:30 uur precies door Richard Kunert geboren op 3 december 1985 te Halberstadt (Duitsland) Promotor: Prof. Peter Hagoort Copromotor: Dr. Roel M. Willems Manuscriptcommissie: Prof. James McQueen (Radboud Universiteit) Prof. Sonja A. Kotz (Universiteit Maastricht) Prof. Henkjan Honing (Universiteit van Amsterdam) Table of Contents Foreword 7 Chapter 1 Introduction 9 Chapter 2 Language influences music harmony 31 perception: effects of shared syntactic integration resources beyond attention Chapter 3 Music and Language Syntax Interact in 97 Broca’s Area: An fMRI Study Chapter 4 When do Music Harmony and Language 121 Syntax Processing Interact? An MEG Study Chapter 5 Structural processing of music and 139 language: imaging domain-specific neural resources Chapter 6 An independent psychometric evaluation 171 of the PROMS measure of music perception skills Chapter 7 General discussion and conclusions 193 References 203 Samenvatting 219 Zusammenfassung 221 Acknowledgements 223 Curriculum Vitae 227 Publications 229 MPI Series in 231 Psycholinguistics Foreword Foreword Many a days during my PhD I asked myself why on earth I am doing a PhD on music and language. -
Language and Music: Sound, Structure, and Meaning L
Advanced Review Language and music: sound, structure, and meaning L. Robert Slevc∗ Language and music are the most impressive examples of humans’ capacity to process complex sound and structure. Though interest in the relationship between these two abilities has a long history, only recently has cognitive and neuroscientific research started to illuminate both what is shared and what is distinct between linguistic and musical processing. This review considers evidence for a link between language and music at three levels of analysis: sound, structure, and meaning. These links not only inform our understanding of language and music, but also add to a more basic understanding of our processing of complex auditory stimuli, structure, meaning, and emotion. © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. How to cite this article: WIREs Cogn Sci 2012, 3:483–492. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1186 INTRODUCTION superficial similarities.4,5 Of course, language and music are complex systems that involve many different peech and music are the most impressive processes; some of these processes may be shared while examples of our ability to make sense out of S others may be domain specific. Therefore, the ways sound. Many have suggested that there might be in which language and music rely on shared and on a relationship between these abilities: to pick just distinct cognitive/perceptual processes is likely to lead two examples, Charles Darwin famously suggested to a richer understanding of both domains. A second that language may have evolved from an early reason to investigate language–music relationships is musical communicative system,1 and the American that research on transfer from music to language conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein proposed (and vice versa) provides an interesting opportunity links between several specific aspects of language and to investigate neural (and behavioral) plasticity. -
The Cognitive Neuroscience of Music
THE COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF MUSIC Isabelle Peretz Robert J. Zatorre Editors OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Zat-fm.qxd 6/5/03 11:16 PM Page i THE COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF MUSIC This page intentionally left blank THE COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF MUSIC Edited by ISABELLE PERETZ Départment de Psychologie, Université de Montréal, C.P. 6128, Succ. Centre-Ville, Montréal, Québec, H3C 3J7, Canada and ROBERT J. ZATORRE Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, H3A 2B4, Canada 1 Zat-fm.qxd 6/5/03 11:16 PM Page iv 1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © The New York Academy of Sciences, Chapters 1–7, 9–20, and 22–8, and Oxford University Press, Chapters 8 and 21. Most of the materials in this book originally appeared in The Biological Foundations of Music, published as Volume 930 of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, June 2001 (ISBN 1-57331-306-8). This book is an expanded version of the original Annals volume. The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2003 All rights reserved. -
A Short History of Biosemiotics
Biosemiotics (2009) 2:221–245 DOI 10.1007/s12304-009-9042-8 ORIGINAL PAPER A Short History of Biosemiotics Marcello Barbieri Received: 20 March 2009 /Accepted: 14 April 2009 / Published online: 6 May 2009 # Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009 Abstract Biosemiotics is the synthesis of biology and semiotics, and its main purpose is to show that semiosis is a fundamental component of life, i.e., that signs and meaning exist in all living systems. This idea started circulating in the 1960s and was proposed independently from enquires taking place at both ends of the Scala Naturae. At the molecular end it was expressed by Howard Pattee’s analysis of the genetic code, whereas at the human end it took the form of Thomas Sebeok’s investigation into the biological roots of culture. Other proposals appeared in the years that followed and gave origin to different theoretical frameworks, or different schools, of biosemiotics. They are: (1) the physical biosemiotics of Howard Pattee and its extension in Darwinian biosemiotics by Howard Pattee and by Terrence Deacon, (2) the zoosemiotics proposed by Thomas Sebeok and its extension in sign biosemiotics developed by Thomas Sebeok and by Jesper Hoffmeyer, (3) the code biosemiotics of Marcello Barbieri and (4) the hermeneutic biosemiotics of Anton Markoš. The differences that exist between the schools are a consequence of their different models of semiosis, but that is only the tip of the iceberg. In reality they go much deeper and concern the very nature of the new discipline. Is biosemiotics only a new way of looking at the known facts of biology or does it predict new facts? Does biosemiotics consist of testable hypotheses? Does it add anything to the history of life and to our understanding of evolution? These are the major issues of the young discipline, and the purpose of the present paper is to illustrate them by describing the origin and the historical development of its main schools. -
Introduction to Biosemiotics Introduction to Biosemiotics
Introduction to Biosemiotics Introduction to Biosemiotics The New Biological Synthesis Edited by Marcello Barbieri University of Ferrara, Italy Library of Congress Control Number: 2008922939 ISBN 978-1-4020-4813-5 (HB) ISBN 978-1-4020-8344-0 (PB) ISBN 978-1-4020-4814-2 (e-book) Published by Springer, P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands. www.springer.com Printed on acid-free paper All Rights Reserved © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. To Thomas Sebeok (1920–2001) and to his vision of a synthesis between Biology and Semiotics TABLE OF CONTENTS Editorial ix Marcello Barbieri Part 1 – Historical Background 1. The Evolutionary History of Biosemiotics 1 Donald Favareau 2. Semiosis in Evolution 69 Tuomo Jämsä 3. Has Biosemiotics Come of Age? and Postscript 101 Marcello Barbieri Part 2 – Theoretical Issues 4. The Necessity of Biosemiotics: Matter-Symbol Complementarity 115 H. H. Pattee 5. What is the Scope of Biosemiotics? Information in Living Systems 133 Stanley N. Salthe 6. Semiotic Scaffolding of Living Systems 149 Jesper Hoffmeyer 7. Biosemiotics and Biophysics – The Fundamental Approaches to the Study of Life 167 Kalevi Kull 8. Is the Cell a Semiotic System? 179 Marcello Barbieri 9. -
Semiótica, Semiótica De La Música Y Semiótica Cognitivo- Enactiva De La Música Notas Para Un Manual De Usuario
Semiótica, semiótica de la música y semiótica cognitivo- enactiva de la música Notas para un manual de usuario. Rubén López Cano [email protected], www.lopezcano.net Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya Rubén López Cano 2007 Los contenidos de este texto están bajo una licencia Creative Commons. Consúltela antes de usarlo. The content on this text is under a Creative Commons license. Consult it before using this article. Cómo citar este artículo: How to cite this article: López Cano, Rubén. 2007. “Semiótica, semiótica de la música y semiótica cognitivo-enactiva de la música. Notas para un manual de usuario”. Texto didáctico (actualizado junio 2007). www.lopezcano.net (Consultado o descargado [día, mes y año]) (Accessed [Day Month Year of access]) Semiótica de la música Rubén López Cano Índice: • Advertencia • Semiótica de la Música • El Signo • ¿Qué es significado en música? • Fundamentos • Saussure y Peirce • Semiótica cognitiva de la música • ¿Semiología o semiótica? • Persuasiones y disuasiones: oferta y problemas de la semiótica de la música • Las ciencias cognitivas • La musicología cognitiva • La cognición enactiva • Como introducirse en el estudio de esto… o Semiótica de la música Algunos autores importantes en el ámbito de la semiótica de la música: Primer encontronazo con la semiótica Introducción a la semiótica general Semiótica de Peirce Semióticas particulares: Eco y Greimas Historia de la semiótica musical Introducción a la semiótica de la música Bibliografia fundamental de algunos maestros de la semiótica musical -
The Paradigm of Peircean Biosemiotics
30 Søren Brier Copenhagen Business School, department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, [email protected] The Paradigm of Peircean Biosemiotics Abstract The failure of modern science to create a common scientific framework for nature and consciousness makes it necessary to look for broader foundations in a new philosophy. Although controversial for modern science, the Peircean semiotic, evolutionary, pragmatic and triadic philosophy has been the only modern conceptual framework that can support that transdisciplinary change in our view of knowing that bridges the two cultures and transgresses Cartesian dualism. It therefore seems ideal to build on it for modern biosemiotics and can, in combination with Luhmann’s theory of communication, encompass modern information theory, complexity science and thermodynamics. It allows focus on the connection between the concept of codes and signs in living systems, and makes it possible to re-conceptualize both internal and external processes of the human body, mind and communication in models that fit into one framework. Keywords: autopoiesis, biosemiotics, Cybersemiotics, Peirce, Sebeok, Hoffmeyer, Kull, Emmeche, Brier, zoösemiotics, phytosemiotics, endosemiotics, ethology, Copenhagen School of Biosemiotics Introduction Semiotics (from the Greek word for sign) is a transdisciplinary study and doctrine of signs in general including signification, perception, communication, codes, media , language and the sign systems used parallel with language. Another way to define it is as the science of signs and their life in society. Code is broadly defined as: everything of a more systematic/orderly nature that the source and the receiver need to know a priori about the relation between the signs in a message both in analogue and digital form, and the area of reality they refer to in order to interpret it. -
25. Musical Syntax I: Theoretical Perspectives
473 25.Musical Musical Syntax I: Theoretical Synt Perspectives a Martin Rohrmeier, Marcus Pearce 25.1 Outline............................................. 473 The understanding of musical syntax is a topic of fundamental importance for systematic musicol- 25.2 Theories of Musical Syntax................. 474 ogy and lies at the core intersection of music theory 25.2.1The Concept of Musical Syntax ............ 474 and analysis, music psychology, and computa- 25.2.2Foundations of Musical Syntax............ 475 tional modeling. This chapter discusses the notion 25.3 Models of Musical Syntax................... 477 of musical syntax and its potential foundations 25.3.1Building Blocks ................................. 477 based on notions such as sequence grammat- 25.3.2Structure Building ............................. 478 icality, expressive unboundedness, generative capacity, sequence compression and stability. Sub- 25.4 Syntactic Models of Diferent Complexity ..................... 478 sequently, it discusses problems concerning the 25.4.1Finite-Context Models........................ 478 choice of musical building blocks to be modeled 25.4.2Finite-State Models ........................... 479 as well as the underlying principles of sequential 25.4.3Context-Free or Equivalent Models...... 479 structure building. The remainder of the chapter 25.4.4Beyond Context-Free Complexity ........ 481 reviews the main theoretical proposals that can be characterized under diferent mechanisms of 25.5 Discussion ........................................ 482 structure building, in particular approaches using 25.A Appendix: The Chomsky Hierarchy ..... 483 fnite-context or fnite-state models as well as 25.A.1Type 3(Regular)................................. 483 tree-based models of context-free complexity (in- 25.A.2Type 2(Context Free) .......................... 483 Part C | cluding the Generative Theory of Tonal Music) and 25.A.3Type 1(Context Sensitive).................... 483 beyond.