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Abstract:
The aim of the dissertation was to investigate the nature of meaning which
can be communicated by music. Several musical routes to meaning, which have
been hypothesised in the literature but so far not researched, were considered and
investigated, specifically the roles of emotion and tension-resolution patterns. In addition
the dissertation investigated the comparability of how meaning is represented
in both music and language, as indicated by associated neural signatures. The role
of musical training was also investigated with regards to the emotional route as well
as the representation of meaning.
The expression of emotions in music has long been considered to communicate
meaningful information to listeners. This was studied in three separate experiments
each using one of three musical features linked with emotional expression (harmonic
roughness, harmonic intervals, instrumental timbre) and manipulating chords
according to each of these. Using an affective priming paradigm, chord primes were
paired with word targets, which were either congruous or incongruous in valence.
Behavioural and electrophysiological responses (specifically event-related potentials,
ERPs) revealed that the emotion expressed by a single chord can modulate
processing the meaning of subsequently presented words, which in turn could be
shown for each of the three features under investigation. No differences as a function
of musical training were found.
In a further experiment the ability of tension-resolution patterns in communicating
meaning was studied using an interactive paradigm with chord sequences and
sentences containing different types of violations. Analysis of electrophysiological
responses showed that an ERP in response to the violation of harmonic expectations
could be modulated specifically by semantic anomalies occuring in simultaneously
presentated sentences. This was taken to suggest that language and music share
neural resources for processing meaning and that tension-resolution patterns can
communicate meaning to listeners familiar with Western music.
The comparability of how meaning is represented in both music and language
was studied using an affective priming paradigm similar to Experiments 1-3 but
using chords as targets and words as primes. The analysis of ERPs showed that
only musically trained participants displayed an N400 in response to incongruous
chord targets, comparable to that found for incongruous target words. A subsequent
fMRI study revealed that whereas incongruous word targets activate the posterior
middle temporal gyrus (MTG) involved in mapping perceptual input to its lexicosemantic
meaning, incongruous chords activated the posterior superior temporal
sulcus (STS) involved in identifying potentially meaningful information in one’s
surroundings. The data speak for a certain similarity in the way meaning is represented
in language and music, but also highlight important functional differences.
