Musical Meaning and the Semiotic Hierarchy: Towards a Cognitive Semiotics of Music
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research on the meaning of music has a long tradition, with approaches from several fields, but it lacks a coherent framework for interdisciplinary discussions. As a result, the notion of meaning in music is fragmented among contrasting perspectives. I propose a cognitive-semiotic approach to the analysis of the meaning evoked by music listening, adopting a framework that eludes disciplinary limitations and expands the notion of meaning to the phenomenological concept of intentionality. For this purpose, I apply Zlatev’s Semiotic Hierarchy to the experience of listening to music, analysing the diversity of meaning-making processes involved in music as distributed among several layers of experience. As a result, I propose an updated version of the Semiotic Hierarchy, clarifying its structure as based on possibilities of meaning-making, and allowing for temporality to pervade experience throughout all layers. I highlight the connectedness and simultaneity of different kinds of intentionality, resulting in the addition of the dimension of aesthetic experience – which I analyze as characterizing culture-general music listening. A key claim is that experiencing music aesthetically articulates the listener’s body in their inner sense of space and time, making them feel a sense of movement and vitality. This grounds music as a semiotic system, connecting with and fostering virtually uncountable subject-relative and culture-specific meaning-making acts.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".