A new theory of music : correspondences of language, emotion, and sound

»For as long as I can remember, I've regarded an adequate theory of music, language of the emotions, as the Holy Grail of musicology. My feeling only grew stronger as the years went by and no such theory appeared. So I decided to tackle the job myself. The book in your hand represents twelve years of research into the topic of music as a language.« Dr. Jonathan Petty looks into the nature of music and musicology to reconsider the way that humanity looks at music and all the elements that go into music. "This model has implications for music, language of emotions. For the psychological content reflected in the MNS and regulated by SES is emotion - primarily the feeling of personal safety in the presence of others, and secondarily, the eudaimonic or positive feelings made possible by such safety. The musical dimension of this maybe intuited when we consider the musical cadence - the 'descent to the tonic' - as a decisive feeling of arriving safely home, 'there's no place like home.' Music's ability to qualify feelings of mild apprehension - i.e. 'dissonance' - may well understood as maneuvers to heighten feelings of stability ('consonance') and homecoming ('tonic'), the essential feelings of personal belonging upon all other eudiamonic feelings are built." (From the Introduction) Resized version of much oversized https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=D709DA80780AFA9AA09BF7A294E5317C A New Theory of Music Table of Contents Introduction CHAPTER ONE But Music Can't Do That! §1.1. The Words Just Came Out Wrong §1.2. The Object Objection §1.3. The “Expression” Conundrum §1.4. Subpoenaing the Brain §1.5. Musical SPACE and Deaf Signing Language §1.6. In What Sense is Music a Human Language? CHAPTER TWO Beauty And The Beast §2.1. Pity Poor Pleasure §2.2. Hedonic and Affective Tones §2.3. Music in Our Opioid Ears §2.4. Musical Pleasure and Primate Grooming §2.5. Where Did All That Pleasure Go? §2.6. Consciousness of Kind CHAPTER THREE The Group Mental System §3.1. A Sociology of the Nervous System §3.2. It’s All Done with Mirrors §3.3. An Essay in Cognitive Hydraulics §3.4. We Feel, Therefore I Am §3.5. Fear is Fear Itself §3.6. Sadness as Affective Axiom CHAPTER FOUR Musicophiliacs, Lend Me Your Ears §4.1. The General Sufficiency Problem §4.2. Roses are Red, S’s are Blue §4.3. The Soprano in the Crypt §4.4. Music’s Multimodal Bouillabaisse §4.5. The Voice of Authority §4.6 Who Turned Out the Lights? CHAPTER FIVE One Man’S Ceiling Is Another Man‘S Floor §5.1. Our Musical Avatar §5.2. Avatars in the Lab §5.3. Avatars in the Concert Hall §§.4. Essays in Symbolic Physics §5.5. A Touching Melody §5.6. The Three Dimensions of Musical SPACE CHAPTER SIX Music’S Homeostatic Grammar §6.1. Descants with Modification §6.2. Performing and Transforming Avatars §6.3. Sympathetic and Parasympathetic Tonal Functions §6.4. Leading Tones and Semantic Come-ons §6.5. Grammatical Comings and Goings §6.6. Affective Primitives and Lexical Tonality A Short Afterword References Index Dr. Jonathan Petty looks into the nature of music and musicology, the topic of music as a language, and the theory of music as a language of the emotions