The music of morality and logic

BRUNO MESZ; PABLO RODRIGUEZ ZIVIC; GUILLERMO CECCHI; MARIANO SIGMAN; MARCOS TREVISAN

Frontiers in Psychology

Frontiers

Lugar: Pavia; Año: 2015

Musical theory has built on the premise that musical structures can refer to somethingdifferent from themselves (Nattiez and Abbate, 1990). The aim of this work is tostatistically corroborate the intuitions of musical thinkers and practitioners starting atleast with Plato, that music can express complex human concepts beyond merely?happy? and ?sad? (Mattheson and Lenneberg, 1958). To do so, we ask whethermusical improvisations can be used to classify the semantic category of the wordthat triggers them. We investigated two specific domains of semantics: morality andlogic. While morality has been historically associated with music, logic concepts, whichinvolve more abstract forms of thought, are more rarely associated with music. Weexamined musical improvisations inspired by positive and negative morality (e.g., goodand evil) and logic concepts (true and false), analyzing the associations between thesewords and their musical representations in terms of acoustic and perceptual features.We found that music conveys information about valence (good and true vs. evil andfalse) with remarkable consistency across individuals. This information is carried byseveral musical dimensions which act in synergy to achieve very high classificationaccuracy. Positive concepts are represented by music with more ordered pitch structureand lower harmonic and sensorial dissonance than negative concepts. Music alsoconveys information indicating whether the word which triggered it belongs to thedomains of logic or morality (true vs. good), principally through musical articulation.In summary, improvisations consistently map logic and morality information to specificmusical dimensions, testifying the capacity of music to accurately convey semanticinformation in domains related to abstract forms of thought.