Musematic and discursive rehearsal of musical elements
Like language, music is made of different elements that constitute a grammar. Linguistics studies the form of these grammatical elements, while semiotics, which is the human science that explores signs and symbols, wants to know more about their meanings. In the musical grammar, musemes are the smallest elements: they are the elementary musical units with a meaning.
Riffs, which are found in rock music and African American music genres are repetitions of musemes: they constitute a musematic repetition. These short musical phrases are generally used in the introduction or refrain of a song and they are themselves repeated through various melodies. Amongst tens of thousands, an example of riff is found in ‘Creep’, written by the alternative rock group Radiohead. The meaning attributed to the riff here is self-pity coming from a pointless crush.
Besides musematic repetition, discursive repetition is the duplication of longer units. An example may be found in ‘Love me tender’ by Elvis Presley. The duplication, here, clearly contributes to create symmetry in the song. As they do not contain the same amount of information, musematic and discursive rehearsals have different effects. Also, discursive repetition is more likely to be varied and prolonged, inserted in various parts of a piece of music.
Linguistics, semiotics and the musical imagery
One main object of music semiotics is to know more about how listeners may combine the musical signs with words and also their mood. Studies were made that involve the field of human psychology, particularly by researcher Bruno de Florence, who drew parallels between music semiotics and essays written by Freud or Lacan in order to provide an overview of music listeners’ imagery.
In the field of linguistics, Noam Chomsky, once introduced by conductor Leonard Bernstein during a conference at Harvard University, was especially interested in music. Chomsky explained that, like the body, the mind is not a uniform, but a highly differentiated system, with different organ and faculties. Language is one of those capacities. Music is another one: music composers have the faculty to think without language. Choosing a melody or writing an orchestral narrative is organizing thought. And music listeners produce a meaning out of the different musical elements that they perceive, producing a response, like in all forms of communication.
Why is it that a sequence of notes, certain rhythmic and specific harmonies produce more meanings than others? Why do they provoke a favourable answer from music listeners? And why is music appreciation fundamentally individual, even if each music genre has general rules that are shared by a community? For the same reasons that a philosophical reflection or an essay will and not another one: each individual emerges from a specific cultural circle and it takes time to form new listening habits: it is like learning another language.
In the field of language, translation is said to be a difficult exercise. ‘Traduttore, tradittore’, says the proverb: the translator cannot transpose the ideas transmitted by words and expressions from a language to another one without making some modifications, so that the result of the translation can make sense for readers of the second language. Well, it is the same in music: as each language, each music genre has its specific imagery to convey messages and we thus understand that both linguistics, which studies the material form of the musical grammar, and semiotics, which tries to interpret music at the musical level, are helpful to attribute meanings to music.