Part #3:
Animal Signals and General Auditory Semantics in Music Cognition
“Music cognition is continuous with normal auditory cognition”: sounds that signal danger (“ROAR!”) or that carry meaning on their causes (“BANG!”) are archetypes from which musical emotions can emerge. Our fourth guest speaker, Professor of Communication Sciences Gregory A. Bryant, will show through recent data how musical sounds that mimic the acoustics of certain animal calls can trigger corresponding emotions in human listeners. Our fifth guest speaker, Professor of Linguistics Philippe Schlenker, will show how a formal semantics of such auditory events can be developped for music. Finally, a second studio report from IRCAM’s “6months” project will show how these ideas can provide inspiration for further experiments on the links between music and emotions.