A Psychological Investigation of Meaning in Music

Abstract

Music has a strong effect on people's mental state and behaviour. This effect can be at a simple motor level, or it can be at a more complex level of arbitrary association or it can be at a much more complex cognitive and representational level. This latter case is of specific interest because it implies that, to some degree, music can be said to have a content that is not musical. Thus, when music is taken to depict a rough sea, then something in the music causes that: the music contains something that is being taken to signify roughness-of-sea. The existence of a large, natural yet arbitrary vocabulary (as is demonstrably the case for language) to relate musical expressions to non-musical events/objects seems implausible. In this paper, the possibility is explored that the vocabulary of musical expression concerns psychological aspects of people. Thus music, it is hypothesised, can express male/female-ness and good/evil-ness and happy/sad-ness and so on. Data obtained in a novel paradigm designed to test this hypothesis are described. Substantial support for the hypothesis is found: the implications of this are discussed.