ISBN 88-7395-155-4 © 2006 ICMPC

1319

Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna, August 22-26 2006

Music as Communication: the Listening Pyramid Margarita Alexomanolaki

Music Department, Goldsmiths College University of London

London, UK m.alexomanolaki@gold.ac.uk

ABSTRACT Music is present in everyday life, perhaps more than ever before, due to technological progress in the means of its broadcast. In communicative terms, music is considered a sign, which carries a meaning that has to be interpreted (Barthes 1977, Nattiez 1990). The usual approach of the semiotic analysis of music in everyday life is either by structural analysis (Tagg 2000) or by the use of theories of psychology that define the semantic role of music (North et al. 2004, Santacreu et al. 2004, North et al. 2005). None-theless the studies mentioned concluded on the specific case studies presented and do not seem to be able to be applied in different listening situations and cultural back-grounds.

This paper aims to evaluate the semiotic role of music from the perspective of the listener and the listening situation – musical communication as it is eventually received and not as it was initially created – emphasizing the different meaning the same musical piece could have depending on its use. Expanding Peirce’s third Trichotomy on how the sign is interpreted, and adjusting it to musical terms, this paper will present the Listening Pyramid, which includes the three stages of listening and interpreting the musical sign. The innovation of the above study is the incorporation of physiology: thus, at the base of the pyramid is our uni-versally shared physiology; in the middle is our partially

common cultural background, and at the top is our unique individual experience.

Defining in which of the stages of the Listening Pyramid the meaning was aimed to be received, then we are ori-ented towards a semiotics analysis which excludes any factors of different cultural background or individual ex-perience that occurs among listeners.

The above will be applied to the music of TV advertising, as a practical example of application of the above theory, but also as one that could have wider ramifications for the field of analysis as a whole.

Keywords

Music, Semiotics, Perception

INTRODUCTION The roles of music in society are present in various

forms; from a lullaby to a baby to the musical reinforce-ment of a commercial, music plays an active role in private and social activities of the members of the community, defining and indicating also part of their cultural identity. Either consciously or not, music could accompany social and personal activities. The fact that music enhances emotional communication reinforces the broad use of music within a broad gamut of contexts:

‘Listeners are still exposed to music in shops, restau-rants, and other commercial environments without active control: but they also control its use in the home, in the car, while exercising, and in other everyday environments. It might be expected that they should do this in order to achieve different psychological ends, such as creating cer-tain mood states, or changing their levels of emotional arousal.’ (North et al. 2004:42)

The variety of uses and the importance of music within society emphasize the firmly-held belief of music’s over-whelming power, which derives from the emergence of ideas associating music with many and varied effects and properties.

MUSIC AS COMMUNICATION Music in communicative terms is considered a sign,

which carries a meaning that has to be interpreted (Barthes 1977, Nattiez 1990). In order for communication to func-tion in general terms there need to be three basic parame-

In: M. Baroni, A. R. Addessi, R. Caterina, M. Costa (2006) Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Music Perception & Cognition (ICMPC9), Bologna/Italy, August 22-26 2006.©2006 The Society for Music Perception & Cognition (SMPC) and European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM). Copyright of the content of an individual paper is held by the primary (first-named) author of that pa-per. All rights reserved. No paper from this proceedings may be repro-duced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or me-chanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the paper's primary author. No other part of this proceedings may be reproduced or transmit-ted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information retrieval system, without permission in writing from SMPC and ESCOM.

ICMPC9 Proceedings

ISBN 88-7395-155-4 © 2006 ICMPC

1320

ters: The Transmitter → the Sign → the Receiver, which in the case of musical communication corresponds to: Com-poser/performer → Music → Listener. According to Burn, one of the social functions of a communicative act is to be ‘orientational – to establish relations between those who are communicating’. (Burn 2003:6)

In order to commence the procedure of communica-tion,

‘The communicator constructs an internal representa-tion of some aspect of the world, such as an emotional state, and then – intentionally – carries out some symbolic behaviour that conveys the content of that representation. The recipient must first perceive this symbolic behaviour, and then recover from it an internal representation of the content it signifies.’ (Juslin 2005: 86)

‘ETHOS’ AND MUSIC COMMUNICATION ‘Ethos’ in ancient Greek is a complicated term:

‘ethos’, in Greek language means ‘habit’; and our habits shape our time. Indeed our way of life is characterized by however habitually we spend our time. Consequently, over time, the word ‘ethos’ began also to develop the meaning of characterization of what hides behind our habits, actions, and manners, which shape our personality and tempera-ment. By elaborating the above point from one individual’s level to that of many people, ethos could characterize an entire culture.

It is true that ethos in music has different interpreta-tions among different cultures, civilizations and periods of time through history. The individual social structure of each people, and the elements that create the uniqueness of each civilization, provide the initial impetus for the way music is conceived in a composition, treated by the audi-ence, taught and interpreted.

The same tonality, C major for example, is ‘educa-tional’ for ancient Greeks (Aristotle, Politics), ‘delightful’ for Persians (Shiloah 1995), ‘tranquil’ for Indians, (Bose 1990), ‘warlike’ for Charpentier, ‘rejoicing’ for Rameau and ‘naïve’ and ‘common’ for Lavignac. (Nattiez 1990).Yet, a single tonality could not really possess all the characteristics attributed to it in the comparative table, but it could have though a wide gamut of representations de-pending on the culture that pre-defined and arranged them.

Peirce’s Trichotomy on Sign / Music Sign-object relation: Music-Meaning

Pierce developed three trichotomies of concepts for analysing different aspects of a sign and distinct types of relationships between the three basic components of semio-sis: sign – object – interpretant. The first trichotomy oc-curred for the sign itself, the second trichotomy involved the sign-object association and the third trichotomy dis-played the sign-interpretant relationship (Turino 1999).

According to Peirce’s second trichotomy of sign, the sym-bol is the third concept that indicates the way that the sign and object are related in a perceiver; the other two concepts are icon, when a sign is related to its object through some type of resemblance between them, and index which refers to a sign that is related to its object through co-occurrence in actual experience (Turino 1999).

When music functions as an icon, entails musical ele-ments to depict its physical representation, as for example the ‘cuckoo’s’ part in Vivaldi’s ‘Spring’ from his Four Seasons. When it functions as index operates as a reminder of a related object or information. For example, ‘a TV show’s theme song can come to serve as an index for the program.’ (Turino 1999: 227)

Meanings of indices are dependent on the experience of the perceiver, and thus can be quite fluid and varied, the meanings of symbols are relatively fixed through social agreement. (1999:228)

Music as a symbol contains ethos, which differentiates its role, depending on the cultural and historical context within which it functions. ‘The meanings of symbols must be basically fixed and agreed upon, or as in this paper,[and indeed in the current thesis] (linguistic) arguments must be made for why their meanings should be altered or refined. (Turino 1999: 228) The symbol is a concept signing emo-tional and moral attitude, the meanings of which, are de-scribed by Barthes not natural but cultural, not given but produced, not discovered but worked for, not real but mythical. (Barthes 2000) Musical ‘ethos’ - as Barthes’ ‘myth’ - ‘once made use of becomes artificial’ (:118).

The Listening Situation This change of listening mode, and the ubiquity of mu-

sic in any occasion and at any time of everyday life, alters the function of listening to music, attributing to musical hearing psychological impacts, that would not only be emotional, but essential reinforcements of everyday activi-ties (DeNora 2000, Hargreaves et al 1997). In addition, we do not always choose the moment to listen to music, or even listen to music consciously.

The difference between ‘listening’ to and ‘hearing’ music that occurs in everyday listening is described by Chion as: ‘The question of listening with the ear is insepa-rable from that of listening with the mind, just as looking is with seeing.’ (Chion 1994:33)

A stereotypical example of hearing in everyday music listening, is the case of ‘muzak’. The term ‘muzak’ is used to describe easy-listening music designed and produced by companies ‘for not-entertainment use in order to cover un-wanted noise (e.g. restaurants, bars), to increase production and decrease ‘absenteeism’ (factories and offices), to com-pensated for anxiety (as in aircraft) or just to create a ‘gen-eral feeling of euphoria’.(Tagg 2000:83).

‘For instance Mozart, when played in factories, super-markets, or airport waiting-lounges, is rarely heard as mu-sic, and it is the circumstances of listening rather than the

ICMPC9 Proceedings

ISBN 88-7395-155-4 © 2006 ICMPC

1321

sounds as such that are responsible for this.’ (Cook 1990:12)

The listener’s attention is not necessarily focused on

another activity or on the music per se, making the listen-ing mode ‘hearing’ in this case as well, but with different intention and function. The ‘intention’ is not necessarily linked with the creation of an easy-listening music, but with the use and consumption of it, since the listening situation alters the initial category of music - such as ‘clas-sical’ in the Cook’s example mentioned above – to ‘easy-listening’ depending on the listening context of it.

‘Works composed for specific secular or religious oc-casions (marches, masses), in specific places (Thailand, Texas) – can turn up as if at random on TV commercials and restaurant tape loops. There’s no longer any necessary connection between the occasion for making music and the occasion of listening it.’ (Frith 2003:93)

When speaking of the communicative character of mu-sic - thus a sign which carries a meaning from the transmit-ter to the receiver/listener - we have to consider that we talk about a musical journey, that its route defines its over-all meaning; that is because the receiver is always the lis-tener, while the listening situation varies, changing the route of this ‘journey’.

The interpretation of music is constantly differentiated depending on the time and place of its listening. DeNora points out that the matter of musical significance is not pre-given, but is rather a result of how that music is appre-hended within specific circumstances: ‘it has been tradi-tionally appropriatable open to reinterpretation and deter-mination in and through use.’ (DeNora 2000:23)

Tota (2001) considers that the composer’s original in-tentions for the performing parameters of his music, to-gether with the proper occasion of the listening, would re-sult the ‘Ideal Listening Situation’, giving the right impor-tance and meaning to the listening experience: ‘In the case of classical music that Ideal Listening could be in the con-cert hall or the living room and not linked to any commod-ity or relationship of market exchange.’ (Tota 2001:115 footnote)

Towards a semiotic analysis, it is necessary to define the category of the sign to which the music under analysis belongs; thus, in the case of Cook’s example this specific piece of Mozart in a concert hall would be a primal sign which is amenable to Peirce’s trichotomy. In the case of reinforcing a TV show or being the soundtrack of a film – which according to Tota’s is characterized as ‘second hand reception’ or Barthes’ second-order schema – it would be an index – or symbol-index. The same music in an airport waiting lounges (Cook’s example) would be considered as muzak.

The listening situation defines the myth of the same piece, since the composer’s (and performer’s) intentions occur clearly in the case of the concert hall, while the crea-tive’s intentions having as starting point the composer’s

ones, are depicted in the case of a TV spot, and just a prac-tical audio masking takes place in the case of airport lounges – hence, not a sign of any kind, according to our definition elaborated above. ‘Music would be expected to fulfil completely different functions in different situations’. (North et al. 2004: 44)

Therefore in the procedure of communication, the re-cipient is an important link, because no matter the initial (if any) intention of the transmitter, it is in the recipient’s in-terpretation that meaning takes its final ‘shape’.

Peirce’s definition of the relation of Sign-Interpretant / Music-Listener

Examining the recipient’s part during a semiotic analy-sis of communication, we should consider Peirce’s con-cepts of interpretant. Peirce divides the receiving of a sign into three levels (see Figure 1): ‘The three types of interpretants also pertain to Firstness (emotional interpre-tant), Secondness (energetic interpretant), and Thridness (language-based concepts).’ (Turino 1999:232)

Peirce defines the above as: ‘1st , Feeling, the consciousness which can be included

with an instant of time, passive consciousness of quality, without recognition or analysis; 2nd , Consciousness of an interruption into the field of consciousness, sense of resis-tance, of an external fact, of another something; 3rd, Syn-thetic consciousness binding time together, sense of learn-ing, thought.’ (Peirce 1991: 185)

Elaborating further, Peirce’s Firstness could corre-spond to the passive or unconscious perception of the sig-nal. As recipients, we do not elaborate further or indeed consciously, the sign we received; that is why Peirce con-siders ‘Firstness is the sheer thisness, or existence of things’ (Ibid: 10), since the sign is received the way it is, and not interpreted.

Figure 1. Perception Pyramid: Levels of Perception and Interpretation according to Peirce.

ICMPC9 Proceedings

ISBN 88-7395-155-4 © 2006 ICMPC

1322

LISTENING PYRAMID

Background music, such as film or TV music, music reinforcing dance or other form of artistic, commercial or social activity is usually received and interpreted ‘uncon-sciously’, since the main focus of the listener – or rather hearer – is upon the activity that music reinforces.

The way of listening described above, embodies the Peircean Firstness, since music is received unconsciously and is not elaborated more on semantic, cultural or personal level. It could be described as Passive Listening, since no action for interpretation is taken by the recipient (see Figure 2). ‘In other words, in order to describe perceptual phenomena, we must take into account that conscious and active perception is only one part of a wider perceptual field in operation’. (Chion 1994:33) The above notion is justified within marketing studies, since the role of music is to ‘veil’ in a non-apparent way, the meaning of the de-picted activities.

The next level of perception of music, corresponds to Peirce’s Secondness, and is related to the cultural refer-ences the recipient makes when listening to music. After the unconscious perception of the Passive Listening, occurs the next step of elaboration is the recognition of the sign and the interpretation within the cultural framework the sign was created and received. ‘Music is interpreted in terms of its relationship to locations, categories, associa-tions, reflections and evaluations relevant to the listener. Relevance to the listener is crucial in this account.’ (Hig-gins 1997:96)

Relevance to the listener is not necessarily individual or personal on this level yet, but corresponds to the general cultural background of the recipient. For example, the in-terpretation of music as a symbol, is a part of the Peircean Secondness, since symbols are culturally produced and presuppose the listener’s common cultural langue with the creator or transmitter of the sign. That is why on this level of listening, more than one people could agree and interpret the sign the same way, as long as they belong to the same culture. This kind of listening, analogous to Peircean Sec-ondness, could be called ‘Cultural Listening’, since it lies as a level of interpretation between the passive perception and the individual interpretation.

After Cultural Listening, where the recipient associates the sign with his/ her cultural background and experience, Individual Listening occurs, which could be considered analogous to Peircean Thirdness. The Individual Listening takes place when the listener associates the musical piece, apart from his/her cultural background, with his/ her per-sonal experiences, memories, or even the specific time and place of listening, which would be experienced differently by each one of us.

‘The temporal, demographic, attentive, local and task-related particulars of the listening situation, all conspire to

dilute the analytical meanings of the well-parsed text to such an extent that the absolute sound recording ceases to exist as an object of analysis; all that remains is personal-ized meaning, personalized using, and personalized listen-ing – “personal text”, in fact’. (Kennett 2003:207-208)

Individual Listening, due to its mutability from person to person is difficult to define and examine. The above kind of listening is responsible for the various responses to mu-sic from individual to individual, though they might share common cultural interpretative denotation of the same mu-sic. ‘What is salient to listeners varies with their individual musical (and generally artistic) backgrounds. (Higgins 1997:95)

Figure 2. The ‘Listening Pyramid’, displaying the levels of perception from implicit to explicit.

The Listening Pyramid shown in Figure 2 depicts the

stages of perception of the musical sign. All three levels occur when listening to music, in a near-instantaneous chain; we perceive, realize and connect with our cultural background and eventually personalize, making listening a unique individual experience. As an audience we do not necessarily realize or distinguish all, some or any of the above levels. During some listening situations, though, music as a sign does not succeed in passing through all the levels of perception.

Cognitive Perception - Listening Pyramid

The Listening Pyramid, although initially connected to semiotics viewpoint, could not stand without the contribu-tion of physiology and psychology, since it refers to the perception and the level of interpretation of the musical information.

When perceiving sound, short-term memory – which is called echoic in this case – is triggered. Echoic memory is the auditory equivalent of iconic memory, thus it is by defi-nition storage of just-received auditory information (Huoti-lainen et al. 2001:133).

ICMPC9 Proceedings

ISBN 88-7395-155-4 © 2006 ICMPC

1323

The Listening Pyramid mentioned, although it is influ-enced by Peircean’s types of interpretant, and though it refers to a semiotic approach of music as a sign, could also be related – schematically and orderly – with the bottom-up cognitive processing of information at perceptual level; thus, the very first stage of perceiving auditory informa-tion, before being processed cognitively, could be consid-ered the Passive Listening stage, the base of the Listening Pyramid. During Passive1 listening in this case, the audi-tory information would either partake in the phenomenon of perceptual learning, or find no connections with long-term memory and decay. In the case of perceptual learning, the information is stored – and recalled – implicitly directly to long-term memory, without any perceptual awareness (Snyder 2000). ‘Calling the knowledge amassed through perceptual learning “implicit” indicates that it is not always available to conscious thought. Neither the knowledge base itself nor the cognitive processes through which it is ap-plied are entirely accessible to consciousness. Listeners typically engage in far more elaborate processing than they are aware of.’ (Dowling 1999: 604)

A higher level processing with the involvement of long-term memory, thus the ‘top’ (long-term memory) of the cognitive system, is referred to as top-down or concept-driven processing. This level of processing could corre-spond to the second and third level of the Listening Pyra-mid, thus the cultural and the Individual Listening.

Corresponding the levels of listening (listening pyra-mid) to information processing and memory activation, the Listening Pyramid of Memory (see Figure 3) could be formed as: Passive Listening being connected to Implicit memory activation, which occurs during the perception of the musical information, Cultural Listening being con-nected to Semantic memory activation, which occurs when we explicitly recognize the musical piece received, and Individual Listening which is connected to Episodic mem-ory activation, since on that level the listening becomes a distinguished personal experience, and will be remembered as such and not as another familiar musical piece.

1 ‘Passive’ is capitalized to show that the term is used here as defined

within the context of the Listening Pyramid.

Figure 3: Listening Pyramid – Memory Activation

Semiotics – Cognitive Perception and the Lis-tening Pyramid

Music in everyday life very frequently is transmitted as ‘invisible’ (Tagg 2000) music, as it is not the dominating aspect of communication at a conscious level in an inde-pendent intramusical sense but rather is inextricably asso-ciated with other messages – visual, mythical and verbal (Tagg 2000:127).

Chion 1994 asserted that sound interferes with our per-ception since it can overwhelm and surprise us no matter what, especially when we refuse to lend it our conscious attention. These conclusions, regarding the unconscious perception of music and the meaning of the depicted activi-ties in a film, indicate that Passive Listening includes in some aspect Cultural Listening as well.

In fact, one could argue that, when the parameters in Cultural Listening are norms, or commonsensical, in a way that they seem too natural to pay them any extra attention, then Passive Listening occurs; not as perceiving passively and with low comprehension, but as performing Cultural Listening unconsciously, functioning as an automatic, non-conscious interpretation of meaning: and the latter explana-tion becomes the difference between mere hearing and the Passive Listening of the Listening Pyramid (see Figure 4).2

2 Below this pyramid, lies a further level that we might call ‘infra-

conscious’: a level of sound stimulus ingress which is purely physio-logical, that Snyder (2000) calls ‘early processing’. I have chosen no to discuss this infra-conscious level as part of my model, because it occurs instantaneously, and before any kind of (even unconscious) cognition.

ICMPC9 Proceedings

ISBN 88-7395-155-4 © 2006 ICMPC

1324

Figure 4. The levels of music perception in combination with conclusions from semiotics and psychology.

Even on a physiological level, our reaction to the

world, the knowledge we have and the memories we con-struct, are culture related as well as individual and per-sonal; therefore myth, in the way Barthes defined it, is pre-sent in the current level of perception. Consequently, ethos in music is always present, related to the psychological reactions an audience might have when hearing musical reinforcements of everyday activities, making Passive Lis-tening a blend between Unconscious Cultural Listening, and bottom-up processing (sensory based experience, Sny-der 2000).

CONCLUSION Music as an entity is never only a form of art, or a per-

formed artistic expression; neither a philosophical state-ment, a semiotic view, an element of cultural identity, a device for emotional impact nor a tool for music therapy; it is all of the above together within any modern mass-mediated society, and this is the reason why in the current thesis, philosophy, semiotics, physiology and psychology had to be combined, in order to achieve a fulfilling, holistic conclusion regarding human perception during everyday music listening situations.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Special thanks to the Alexandros S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation for supporting financially the current study.

REFERENCES

Aristotle (1993). Politics. Translated in Modern Greek by The Translating Team of Kaktos .Athens: Kaktos Publications.

Barthes R. (1977). Image, Music, Text. Translated in English by S. Heath. London: Fontana Press.

Barthes, R. (2000). Mythologies. Translated in English by J. Cape. London: Vintage.

Bose S. (1990). Indian Classical Music: Essence and Emotions. Delhi: Vikas Publishing PVT LTD.

Burn A. & Parker D. (2003. Analysing Media Texts. London: Continuum.

Chion M. (1994). Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Edited and translated in English by C. Gorbman. New York: Columbia Uni-versity Press.

Clarke E. (2005). Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning. New York: Oxford Univer-sity Press.

Cook N. (1990). Music, Imagination and Culture, Oxford: Clar-endon Press.

DeNora T. (2000). Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press.

Dowling W.J. (1999). The development of music perception and cognition. In D. Deutsch (Ed.) The Psychology of Music (pp. 603-625). London: Academic Press.

Frith S. (2003). Music and Everyday Life. In Clayton M., Herbert T., and Middleton R. (Eds.) The Cultural Study of Music (pp. 92-101). London: Routledge.

Hargreaves, D.J. & North A.C. (1997). The Social Psychology of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Higgins K.M. (1997). Musical idiosyncrasy and perspectival lis-tening. In J. Robinson (Ed.) Music and Meaning (pp. 83-104). New York: Cornell University Press.

Huotilainen M., Kujala A. & Alku P. (2001). Long-Term memory traces facilitate short-term memory trace formation in audition in humans. Neuroscience Letters, Vol. 310, pp. 133-136.

Juslin P.N., 2005: ‘From mimesis to catharsis: expression, percep-tion, and induction of emotion in music’, in D. Miell, R. Mac-Donald and D. J. Hargreaves (Eds) Musical Communication, Ox-ford: Oxford University Press, pp. 85-116.

Nattiez J.J. (1990). Music and Discourse. Translated in English by Carolyn Abbate. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

ICMPC9 Proceedings

ISBN 88-7395-155-4 © 2006 ICMPC

1325

North A.C., Hargreaves D.J. & Hargreaves J.J. (2004). Uses of music in everyday life. Music Perception, Vol. 22 No1, 41-77.

North A.C. & Hargreaves D.J., (2005). Musical communication in commercial contexts. In D. Miell, R. MacDonald and D. J. Har-greaves (Eds) Musical Communication (pp. 405-422). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Peirce C.S. (1991). Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic. Edited by J. Hooper. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Santacreu O. & Alaminos A.(2004). Let the music play the feel-ings: The performative effect of music in advertising. In R. Parn-cutt, A. Kessler and F. Zimmer (Editors) Proceedings of the Con-ference on Interdisciplinary Musicology (CIM04) Graz / Austria, 15-18 April 2004. Obtained electronically via http://gewi.uni-graz.at/~cim04/ on 24/10/04.

Shiloah A. (1995). Music in the World of Islam: A Socio-cultural Study. Aldershot: Scolar Press.

Snyder B. (2000) Music and Memory. Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Tagg P. (2000). Kojak – 50 Seconds of Television Music: towards the understanding of affect in popular music. New York: The Mass Media Scholars’ Press, Inc.

Tota A.L. (2001). When Orff meets Guinness: music in advertis-ing as a form of cultural hybrid. Poetics, Vol. 29,109-123.

Turino T. (1999). Signs of imagination, identity, and experience: A Peircian semiotic theory for music. Ethnomusicology, Vol. 43 No2, 221-255.