The nature of musical meaning and its bearing on the processing of lyrics

Authors

KARBANOVÁ Alice

Year of publication 2022
Type Article in Proceedings
Conference Studies in Language and Mind 4
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Arts

Citation
Web https://digitalna.ff.uns.ac.rs/sadrzaj/2022/978-86-6065-735-2
Keywords cognitive semantics; musical semantics; mental representation; song interpretation; brain overlap
Attached files
Description Similarities between language and music have in past decades attracted scholars from various disciplines as music has proven a valuable tool for research of human cognition. Given the shared underlying mechanisms,music may also help identify the nature of meaning representations and the way in which they are processed in the brain. Song, a ubiquitous human behavior,represents the most natural setting for comparison of linguistic and musical semantics, and therefore lies at the heart of this paper. In an interdisciplinary approach, this paper underscores the parallels between linguistic and musical meaning. Drawing on evidence from cognitive neurosciences,it also calls attention to the possible ways in which music might influence the interpretation of lyrics in a song by highlighting their overlapping processing mechanisms. The purpose of this review is to summarise evidence on musical semantics and to show how it can advance our understanding of linguistic semantics and semantic cognition in general.
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