Music

Abstract

2The defining feature of music as a cognitive function is tonality (scale structure), since rhythmic structure is a shared feature with dance and poetry. In this chapter, the author develops a 4T (tonality/timing/texture/text) model of music, which views music as a suite of coordinative features in which rhythm provides time slots for interpersonal coordination and scale structure provides pitch slots for coordination. An important topic for the study of music’s evolution is its connection with both speech and language. Music and speech share a significant number of prosodic properties. However, a unique feature of music that is not found in speech is the process by which scale types are able to convey emotional meanings. Such scale/emotion associations allow music to modulate the interpretive meaning of narrative artforms, such as film, dance, and written texts (i.e. songs).