Music, Emotion and Language: Using Music to Communicate

Music, Emotion and Language: Using Music to Communicate

ABSTRACT: There has yet to be a culture discovered which lacks music. Music is a part of our existence, but we do not fully understand it. In this paper, working in the tradition of Aristotle, Wittgenstein and Langer, I elucidate some of the connections between music and the emotions. Using contemporary philosophy of mind theories of emotion, I explain how we can have a better understanding of our emotive responses to music. I follow the pattern through representational painting and abstract painting to music, and show how each functions as an intentional object for the object of our emotions in response to each art form.

There has yet to be a culture discovered which lacks music. Making music is seen historically to be as fundamental as the characteristically human activities as drawing and painting. Many even go so far as to compare music to language and claim that music functions as a "universal language." But it is rarely the same music, however, that all peoples respond to. What is it that we are responding to when we listen to music? Strictly speaking, music is not a language, (1) because it has neither outside referents nor easily detectable meaning. Ludwig Wittgenstein explains that although we understand music in a similar way as we understand language, music is not a language because we still cannot communicate through music as we can through language. (2) More recently, Susanne Langer argues that although we understand music as symbol, because we are so caught up in seeing symbolic form function like language we tend to want to make music into a language. But, Langer argues, music is not a kind of language (3) because the significance of music lies not in w...

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...5) Poetics. 1447a.

(6) Rhetoric. 1378a20. "The emotions are all those feelings that so change men as to affect their judgements, and that are also attended by pain or pleasure. Such are anger, pity, fear and the like with their opposites."

(7) The cause and the object of an emotion can be the same thing, but are often times not the same. The object is the thing at which the emotion is directed while the cause is the thing which prompted the emotion. For example, when I am angry because my dog ate my shoes, my anger is caused by the dog, but the object of my anger is my frustration of my wish that my shoes not be destroyed.

(8) Walton, Kendall. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. pp. 196, 250.

(9) Anthony Storr. Music and the Mind. New York: Ballantine Books, 1992. p.2.