Introductory notes to the Semiotics of Music - Philip Tagg's home page

20 P Tagg: Notes on Semiotics of Music The specificity of musical communication
� an individual and himself/herself
� two individuals
� an individual and a group
� a group and an individual
� individuals within the same group
� members of one group and those of another.
Specifically musical (and choreographic) states of communication are those involving
a concerted simultaneity of nonverbal sound events or movements, that is, between a
group and its members, between a group and an individual or between two groups.
This means that whereas you can sing, play, dance, talk, paint, sculpt and write to or
for yourself and for others, it is very rare for several people to simultaneously talk,
write, paint or sculpt in time with each other. In fact, as soon as speech is subordinated to
temporal organisation of its prosodic elements (rhythm, accentuation, relative pitch, etc.), it
becomes intrinsically musical, as is evident from the choral character of rhythmically
chanted of slogans in street demonstrations or, even more obviously, from the ‘choir’
of ancient Greek drama. In this way, music and dance are particularly suited to expressing
collective messages of affective and corporeal identity of individuals in relation to themselves,
each other, and their social, as well as physical, surroundings. 39
Musical signification
Musical structures and parameters
If, as we have suggested, music is related to something other than itself, how do such
relationships work? To answer this question, it is first necessary to identify music’s signifiers
and then to try and determine what those signifiers signify. This task begs in its
turn any number of basic methodological questions, the first being ‘what is a musical
structure’? Can a musical structure be defined as an objective quantity in numerical
terms, for example as the range of digital values in a WAV file, or as the values contained
in one of the thousand-odd samples of synchronic sound registered by a CD
player every second it spins round? Is it a sonogram of a one or two-second cut out of
a recorded performance of music?
If, as we have already stated, music is a matter of communication, and if the many binary
values constituting one sample of sound on a CD are phenomenologically meaningless,
because you can’t hear anything lasting a thousandth of a second and because
most people can make no musical sense out of sonogram or oscillograph curves, then
those objective representations of sound are just that and cannot be regarded as structural
units of musical meaning. In other words, all such quantitative representations of
sound may be 99.99% accurate and reliable but their coding is determined in terms of
acoustic physics, not in terms of musical communication. They are designed to represent
what happens sonically without considering with what intentions or effects the
sounds are or are not invested.
To clarify this issue, imagine suggesting to visual semioticians that they base their theories
of meaning in pictures on numerical print-outs of pixel values at a resolution of x
thousand of dots per inch. Now, this suggestion takes no heed of the cultural construction
of Gestalt in visual communication because the art or film scholar, not to mention
the average viewer, is far more likely to go for far larger, culturally relevant aspects of
visual representation, like colour, shape, form, darkness, light, shadow, grain, movement,
visual archetypes, etc. Obviously, this does not mean that pixel counts are irrelevant
to the physical structure of a particular (part of a) picture any more than
39. Even multitracking, overdubs, etc., although frequently performed by the same individual on different
occasions, constitute an intrinsic collectivity of parts or voices.