In this talk, Elizabeth will integrate perspectives from the natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities to suggest an interdisciplinary approach to the problem of musical meaning. Musical meaning, as viewed through the lens of human communicative behaviors, can be understood as rooted in biology, despite the fact that complex cultural and social factors cannot be reduced to the purely biological.
Specifically, music is grounded in a culturally universal form of human vocal communication that is on a continuum with speech, and musical meaning can be at least partially understood in terms of the evolution of meaning in animal communication and as a consequence of a uniquely human form of sociality.
