What sorts of things can be communicated? In principle, any thought can be communicated, provided a medium that is capable of handling that thought, and a community of at least two interlocutors that are capable of wielding that medium.26 For example, a principal feature of spoken and written language (indeed, all ‘Language’ with an upper case ‘L’) is the ability to communicate propositions. Therefore, all thought capable of being framed in terms of propositions can be expressed by spoken and written language. The only types of mental content that cannot be communicated are those for which no appropriate communicative medium exists. If such mental content indeed exists, we would not be able to represent it in any communicative medium we currently possess.
Questions remain as to the nature of the mental states that are realised in the minds of persons who are on the receiving side of communicative acts. Different sorts of thoughts require different sorts of communicative media, which in turn result in different sorts of mental states. Some states result in beliefs, others in emotion or affect, and others are contributors to a pool of knowledge. The use of the English language, to communicate a proposition about the weather, results in a belief in the mind of the listener with respect to the proposition communicated. The sorts of mental states we are concerned with are those termed cognitive states (which often lead to the formation of beliefs) and affective states (which result in the
26
experience of affects). However, before we consider these concepts more closely, we should narrow our discussion down to the two communicative media that interest us the most: language and music.
It has already been mentioned that music is to be thought of as a communicative medium. The goal of communication is the elicitation of desired mental states in the mind of the listener. An obvious question now arises: what nature of thought is communicated with musical utterances? It is clear that music communicates ‘content’ that is not easily facilitated in a form of spoken language.27 If musical thoughts were easily represented in speech, we would have to wonder what precisely the point of musical communication would be. In terms of communication, it would not be parsimonious to have one communicative medium that handled all the same sorts of content that could be more easily handled by another medium.
It is possible to imagine that the sort of content that is communicated with musical utterances could be of two varieties. The first is of the sort that could indeed be communicated by some other communicative medium, albeit not quite so easily. For instance, it is possible to speak of music in terms of structure, tonality, and thematic material. These are all concepts that are firmly in the domain of propositional content, and hence are expressible in the various manifestations of natural language (such as speech and writing). We could say that a particular piece has a melody consisting of these notes, and a temporal duration expressible in seconds, and this and that timbre, expressed in terms of the relative amplitudes of its fundamental frequency and partials. But it is far easier to listen to the piece of music in question – all of this linguistically framed information can be actively experienced in a single musical utterance, akin to a sort of demonstrative survey of the piece. It is difficult to imagine any linguistic description of a piece being fine-grained enough to capture every describable element that is heard. Likewise, any linguistic description of the piece is likely to highlight aspects of the music that might not necessarily have come to conscious attention, in the manner in which labels appended to a diagram of the vertebrate eye presents information in manner not identical to actual visual experience of an eye. Listening to a musical piece also grants us access to a different way of representing this propositional content – that is, a language-free description. This is a different way of encountering the music, and brings with
27
In the ensuing discussion, the term ‘content’ is used mainly as a matter of convenience. We might describe the content of a mental state representing the proposition ‘The grass is green’ as simply that statement (i.e. the content of a mental state is that mental state).
it the important aspect of musical experience that cannot be linguistically represented: what it is like to experience the music.
This brings to our attention the second sort of content that we may imagine music being capable of communicating, which is content that cannot be communicated in any other communicative medium. These are, if you will, uniquely musical thoughts, which are inexpressible in any other medium than music. By analogy, we can imagine a similar scenario for gesture, or any other communicative medium. We shall see that this sort of content can, for our purposes, be lumped together with content that is not expressible in the form of propositions. This larger category of content will be called non-propositional content (NPC), of which uniquely musical thoughts are one type.28
Spoken language is similar in this regard. It too is capable of representing content that can be represented in another medium. We can describe a vertebrate eye, but the communicative medium of a picture is far easier to use and understand. However, once again, experiencing a description of the eye, experiencing a diagram of the eye, and experiencing the eye itself are not equivalent. The second sort of content – that is, content that cannot be represented in any other medium – is also present. Arguably, there are concepts unique to each medium that we would struggle to find any other way of expressing. Temporal concepts are a good linguistic example. How else but with language can we communicate concepts like ‘later’, ‘yesterday’, or ‘in the future’? It would seem that only linguistic creatures can possess the ability to talk (or even think) about these sorts of concepts. Added to this is the fact that language is tailor- made to express propositions. Therefore, it may make sense to say that language is able to communicate concepts and propositional content, as well as other types of content via performative and pragmatic means.
How far an analogy between music and language can be stretched remains to be seen. For now, we can note that both are communicative media in the sense that utterances serve to affect changes in the mental state of listeners, usually with the aim of the listener experiencing a mental state that the utterer intends. The change in mental state is usually realised by content in the mind of the listener, and that content can either be propositional or
28
The reader should note that I have stopped short of saying that the communication of such uniquely musical thoughts is the raison d’être for music’s existence. I think that given current thought about the evolutionary rationale behind musical behaviour, the idea that the need to express uniquely musical thoughts provided the pressure required for selection of musical traits is implausible.
non-propositional, and can sometimes be unique in that it can only be communicated via a particular communicative medium. So far, the analogy between music and language is common to all communicative media. Of course, both music and language (in its speech modality) are forms of aural communication. Both require the perception and production of sound for their effectiveness. This holds the implication that both require some sort of parsing or processing in the mind, in order to differentiate them from other sounds in the environment. The precise nature of this parsing and processing of aural perception with regard to music will be developed later. In anticipation, we can ask whether it is possible that our analogy can be extended in general to the mental processing of music and language, its effect on our mental states, and the sorts of mechanism that allow the implementation of such mental states.
One aspect of comparisons between music and language is the idea that both feature principles for the combination of sonic elements into utterances that are well-formed. In language, this set of principles is grammar, whether one speaks of the generative, innate variety, or more culturally-specific grammatical idiosyncrasies. With regard to music, questions of rules and principles for forming acceptable strings of sound are often subsumed by the notion of the musical styles present within a given culture. Thus, we could say that there are principles present within a musical community for combining sounds to create acceptable musical utterances. While a piece may be in violation of certain culturally determined stylistic rules, it may still be comprehensible in terms of deeper, cognitively- based rules. Whether this deeper, universal, and cognitively-based level of principles for music exists seems to me to be beyond question, even though the details of this level and its fundamental nature have not been agreed upon by the broader musicological community. Indeed, in comparison to studies of language, there have been few attempts to investigate this matter.29 For now, we are able to say that both music and language are aural communicative
29
Both the matter of syntax and the matter of musical universals are by no means areas of agreement in musicology. This is not to say that attempts at plotting universal features of music haven’t been penned, with a notable early example being Erpf (1967). The most obvious musical universal is the fact that, in all recorded societies, the activity of music-making is itself a universal (Peretz, 2006; Blacking, 1995; Nettl, 2005). This is another analogy between music and language, but one that we should be careful of considering remarkable. After all, ritualised preparation of food is another universal in human societies, but we would be wary of attributing this to any special cognitive process. What we should ask is whether there are, within the world-wide music-making community, aspects of the activity that are universal and analogous to language. (We will discount the functional universals of music for now, and focus on the properties of the sonic phenomenon itself.) To do so, we would require an extensive knowledge of linguistic and musicological data, with special attention paid to neuroscientific evidence. For more on the universals of the world’s music, see Nettl (2005), especially
media, and that both require the combination of discrete sounds in accordance with rules for their combination into utterances (whatever the fundamental nature of these rules is). The perception of both music and language require the listener to identify the sounds as music or language, and to assess whether the utterance in question is well-formed or not. Provided an intelligible utterance, a particular mental state is elicited in the mind of the listener.