The Musical Code between Nature and Nurture: Ecosemiotic and Neurobiological Claims

Abstract

This contribution is about sense-making in music. In an attempt to bring together such diverging fields as semiotics and neurobiology, it argues for a processual approach to music which conceives of “music users” as organisms that “cope” with their environment. It is a position which calls forth ecological and epistemological assumptions and which stresses the importance of a conception of music-as-dealt-with rather than a static conception of music as structure or artefact. As such, it considers music as a sounding and temporal art which appeals to lower-level mechanisms of reactivity as well as to acquired mechanism of sense-making which are the outcome of a learning history. It is argued, further, that there is a continuum between lower level sensory processing and higher-order cognitive elaboration. The musical code, accordingly, holds a hybrid position between innate and wired-in dispositions and higher-level cognitive processing mechanisms. The very concept of code, further, is given some theoretical grounding as well as empirical evidence from the domains of psychophysics, psychobiology and neurobiology.