CATEGORIES OF MUSIC THEORY IN TERMS OF LINGUISTIC COMMUNICATION SIGITAS MICKIS
Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre / Academy of Music of Vytautas Magnus University sigitasmickis@outlook.com
This report seeks to infuse alternatives into the usual typology based on music theory to support the composition, performance, or analysis of music. The assumptions of ethnomusicology, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience are used to do so, especially the communicative theory of musical meanings (Cross and Woodruff, 2009). The field of sound communication, analyzing the similarities and differences of music with speech, is divided into three dimensions – motivation of social uncertainty, cultural power, and social intentions, showing that the latter is reasonably conceptualized in a bundle of categories and tools of analysis. In the speech analysis, such tools are classified as prosody, but linking the latter to possible music-only entrainment shows an alternative contribution to the meaningful discourse of typologies in music theory (based on the biological and psychological assumptions of humans as a species). Examples of application of the signification concept include short-term perceptual memory focus (attention) control with metrical accents, the influence of dimensional perception of frequency (e. g., low perceived as the big one) on arrangement intentions, differentiation of sound emanation effort, and biological sound communication power with melodic and rhythmic contours (e.g., wide vs. narrow, open vs. closed), as well as recursive cyclicality of musical structures (musical form associations and hierarchy). The benefit of the presented cognitive method is alternative consideration of musicking solutions from a communicative point of view (next to insights based on intuition and/or the tradition of music theory), possibly allowing message encoding to music on a more immediate supra-cultural level. Keywords: communicative interaction of music typology and signification, sound emanation prosody, cyclicity of musical entrainment, supra-cultural intentions of making music, musical motivation of social uncertainty. Sigitas Mickis (b. 1969) studied piano at the National M. K. Čiurlionis School of Art. He holds a Master of Piano Performance (1993, under Prof. Raimundas Kontrimas), a Master of Composition (2008, under Prof. Rimantas Janeliauskas), and a Doctor of Art (2018, artistic research project “Projection of the phenomenon of creativity in musical composi-
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