Meaning of Music and Meaning of Sounds

The discussion around the meaning of music is a complicated one. Several distinguished approaches have been proposed. For instance, one may put the accent on the internal structure of music and the consequent expectations it gives rise to; or on the extra-musical meaning, more bound to memories and affects; or on the physical nature & laws of perception. With regard to this latter view, the timbre of the sound becomes itself meaningful, regardless of a possible context. One way to study the semiotics of sounds is to see how it is influenced by linguistic processing. At this aim we designed an experiment to test whether there can be semantic priming across linguistic and sound object domains. We selected sounds based on an acousmatic approach, meaning that the source that produced the sounds could not be recognized, giving the listener the possibility to experience the sound for its own sake disconnected from its original context. For this purpose, we built a rather large corpus of short sounds and asked 10 subjects to write one or more words that they beleived to be related to each sound. Then we selected the most consistent 45 sound/word related pairs. We used the selected material in an experiment wherein words were shortly presented on a computer screen and were followed by a sound that could be related or non-related. We asked subjects to decide as quickly as possible whether the word/sound pair was related or not. We also recorded EEG signal from 32 scalp electrodes. Preliminary results indicate a negative component time-locked to sounds that resembles the N400 component described for semantic processing of words. Moreover, sound processing seem to be strongly influenced by the semantic role (related/non related) of preceding words. This study allows to better understand the cognitive processing of complex sounds and its relation to linguistic semantic processing. Finally, precise ongoing acoustical analyses of sounds will give a hint on how acoustical properties relate to meaning.