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

36 P Tagg: Notes on Semiotics of Music Musematic analysis
cay’ has only offered five (‘boring’, ‘1980s’, ‘video’, ‘urban’, ‘decay’). Since both respondents
come from a similar background and since they are reacting to the same
music, it is reasonable to regard ‘abandoned warehouse’ and ‘urban decay’ as part of
the same paramusical semantic field. It would also be useful to know how many respondents
associated to ‘grunge’ or the ‘eighties’, how many mentioned some kind of
social decay (e.g. unemployment) or violence (e.g. ‘chase’, ‘brandish’, ‘chain saw’).
A useful second step in systematising responses is to divide them into three basic categories:
[1] opinions, such as ‘boring’, ‘great music’, ‘bad taste’, etc; [2] intramusical associations,
including musical works, styles and structural traits, as well as artists,
composers, instruments, etc; [3] all other responses. Responses of type 2 are useful for
interobjective comparison purposes (p. 36, ff.), while those of type 1, although of little
direct relevance to the analysis of musical signification, may cast light on patterns of response
at a later stage. 54 Responses of type 3 — all others — will of course need further
categorisation. Whether observing behaviour in response to music or dealing with verbal
and visual associations to music, a basic response taxonomy can be quite useful (see
p. 44, ff.).
There are two main advantages in using intersubjective observation in music semiotics:
(i) it allows you to state that a certain proportion of a certain body of people at a certain
time under certain conditions in a certain sociocultural context responded in a certain
way to certain music; (ii) it calls for no musicological expertise whatsoever. Intersubjective
observation provides vital information on many aspects of the basic communication
process (fig. 1, p. 10) in relation to a particular body of music, especially in terms
of reception and response. It also allows you to posit viable hypotheses about the ‘intended
message’, as well as about which structural elements within the ‘channel’ may
or may not be related to which responses to the music. This final aspect — relating observations
about musical reception to structural elements — requires considerable familiarity
on the analyst’s part with the musical object giving rise to all those
intersubjectively shared patterns of response. It is in this context that an interobjective
approach comes in handy in helping us discover how particular patterns of musical
structuration relate to particular patterns of response.
Interobjectivity
If an analytical approach establishing consistency of response to the same piece of music
played to different listeners is called intersubjective, then an interobjective approach
is one which establishes consistency of structure between different pieces of music.
While intersubjective inquiry allows you to relate a piece of music in general to a set of
responses to that music, the procedure of interobjective comparison relates a particular
piece of music to other pieces of music.
Now, relating music to other music may seem like a futile exercise because, at least in
academic circles, only verbal and numeric symbols appear to own any validity as metalanguage.
We would, in other words, seem to be no closer to an explanation of what
the music under analysis is communicating. However, as we have already observed (p.
18, points 2-3), musical discourse possesses a degree of relative autonomy. This means
that although music is most definitely related to society, in that it is so obviously connects
with phenomena outside its own discourse, it also actually refers to itself on its
own terms. In fact, people in the process of making music are far more influenced by
54. For example, if there is significant intersubjective agreement that a piece is boring and if the music in
question also elicits a large number of blank responses, then those respondents may well be unfamiliar
with the store of symbols operating in that music (codal incompetence) or opposed to the sociocultural
norms encoded in the music (codal interference). Of course, codal incompetence or interference
may be equally in operation at the transmitting end.