Music and Semiotics: An Experiential Approach to Musical Sense-Making

Abstract

This chapter sketches recent evolutions of semiotics as applied to music. Rather than providing merely a historical overview, it focuses mainly on the pragmatic turn in semiotics and the role of sensory experience in the process of musical sense-making. In order to elaborate on this experience, it delves into theoretical groundings of second-order cybernetics, biosemiotics, and ecological psychology, which are then applied to the field of music. Much effort is made to provide a broader framework to illustrate the transition from a disembodied to an embodied approach to musical semiotics. Special emphasis is laid on the concept of affordance and the role of interactions with the sounds.