Towards an Evolutionary, Semiotic and Compositional Perspective

February, 2011

Music / Language Interrelations: Towards an Evolutionary, Semiotic and Compositional Perspective is a research project that seeks to situate my academic interests cultivated during my tenure as a doctoral student at the University of Toronto. The central thesis of this research is three fold. The first section is concerned with a survey of recent hypotheses regarding evolutionary foundations involving language and music. The second section outlines the humanistic perspective of music meaning by revealing how music theorists and composers alike have been influenced by linguistic notions of referential meaning. In an applied trajectory, we will then examine the means by which composers have utilized speech in the composition of both acoustic and electroacoustic works. This project will conclude by synthesizing our research into a formal model, which represents the topographical “space” in which composers have traversed. It is my hope that this model can be used to help inform future scholarship in the study of language in musical composition.

Keywords: music and language, composition, speech-music composition, composition techniques, evolutionary musicology, semiotics, rhetoric, linguistics

Length: 129 pages

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