ELM2: Expression, Language, and Music Conference
Date: October 4–6, 2024
Location: UConn, Zachs Family Fine Arts Administration Building
The Expression, Communication, and Origins of Meaning (ECOM) research group hosted their second ELM conference, bringing together researchers from linguistics, music theory, anthropology, neurobiology, cognitive science, and philosophy. Sessions focused on the significance of emotional expression in music and language, systematic structure, and the emergence of language as seen across disciplines. Attendees traveled from around the world, including China, Switzerland, Germany, Canada, and Iceland.
Thank YOU for this very stimulating and really well organized conference! It was fun and inspiring.
— Isabelle Charnavel, Université de Genève
Speakers
- Aniruddh Patel (Tufts, Psychology)
- Paul Boghossian (NYU, Philosophy)
- Isabelle Charnavel (Université de Genève, Linguistics)
- Reyna Gordon (Vanderbilt, Psychology)
- Eduardo Mercado (University at Buffalo, Psychology)
- Philippe Schlenker (NYU & École Normale Supérieure, Linguistics)
- Alison Wray (Cardiff, Language and Linguistics)
Reception
The first day ended with a lively reception, musical performances, and discussions organized by Stefanie Acevedo (UConn Music Theory; IBACS), featuring performances by conference participants.
We could not have asked for a better scholarly venue or confab of scholars – their input will prove invaluable. And it was really wonderful to hear and enjoy their music-making at the reception.
— Peter Kaminsky, UConn Music
Sample Talks
What is the Role of Meaning in Musical Experience?
Paul Boghossian (NYU)
Paul Boghossian revisits the classic questions: Does music have an extra-musical meaning? If so, what is it? How is it determined? And what role does it play in our appreciation of music?.
Genomic discoveries shed new light on human musicality and language
Reyna Gordon (Vanderbilt)
Studies of inter-individual differences in musical rhythm and language skills often show positive associations, even when the stimuli and tasks are quite different. Complementing neurocognitive explanations, in this talk I will focus on genomic approaches that are unraveling some of the shared variance between people's rhythm and language abilities. I will discuss the Musical Abilities, Pleiotropy, Language, and Environment (MAPLE) framework, and make a case that it will fill a key gap in our understanding of the etiology of individual differences in language acquisition and skill during the lifespan . We posit that musical and language-related abilities likely share some common genetic architecture (i.e., genetic pleiotropy) in addition to some degree of overlapping neural endophenotypes. I will present new genomic and epidemiological findings in support of MAPLE's predictions, revealing mechanistic underpinnings in the form of pleiotropy of rhythm and language traits and their downstream neurobiological processes influenced by that shared genetic variation.
Linking Music and Dance Perception: a Linguistics-based approach
Isabelle Charnavel (Université de Genève)
The specific goal of the talk is to apply the formal methodology of linguistics to the exploration of the interaction between music and dance rhythm perception based on specific case studies from the Western tradition. The more general goal is to shed further light on the organizational principles governing the mental representations induced by dance and music perception, as well as their relationship, by distinguishing between general cognitive properties and modality-specific or domain-specific properties.
Phonological Rhythm Constrains Speech and Musical Gestures
Kathryn Franich (Harvard)
In many musical traditions, rhythmic aspects of spoken language interact with musical form. Theorists studying the music of West and Central Africa have alluded to the importance of spoken language rhythm in shaping musical form; however, little linguistic work has sought to understand the rhythmic properties of languages spoken in sub-Saharan Africa. I draw on patterns from 2 multi-modal corpora of language and gesture for speakers of Medʉmba and Igbo to demonstrate that rhythmic structure is not only a critical component of linguistic grammar for these languages, but also serves as a locus for coordination of linguistic and musical gesture.
Emotive Expressions and Discourse Structure
Christian De Leon (Williams)
Emotive expressions (including facial expressions, emotive markers, emoji, linguistic expressives, and emotional prosody) are classically analyzed as contributing content that is aside from the "main point" of an utterance—contributing not-at-issue content. I argue that emotive expressions enable a special kind of speech act that is unpredicted by standard views. I present data that show how an emotive makes a speaker's expressed attitude available for explanation, regardless of medium (e.g., prosody vs. written "damn") or whether the attitude makes sense in context. I develop a dynamic discourse semantics on which emotives make public commitments available for certain anaphoric relations.
Musical Neurodynamics
Ed Large (UConn)
A great deal of research in the neuroscience of music suggests that neural oscillations synchronize with musical stimuli. One well-known consequence of synchronization is expectation; however, neural synchronization has far-reaching implications for music. I will describe how fundamental dynamical principles based on known neural mechanisms can explain basic aspects of music perception and performance, as summarized in neural resonance theory (NRT). Building on principles such as resonance, stability, attunement, and strong anticipation, I suggest that people anticipate events not through predictive neural models, but because brain-body dynamics physically embody musical structure. The interaction of certain kinds of sounds with ongoing pattern-forming dynamics results in patterns of perception, action, and coordination that we collectively experience as music. Statistically universal structures may have arisen in music because they correspond to stable states of complex, pattern-forming dynamical systems. This analysis of empirical findings from the perspective of neurodynamic principles sheds new light on the neuroscience of music and on what makes music powerful.
The Metasemantics of Music
John Schindler (Pittsburgh)
Many believe that, in addition to expressing emotions, music represents extramusical ideas; however, there is scant philosophical literature discussing what it is for a piece of music to have a particular representational meaning—music’s metasemantics. To answer this question, I distinguish between a musical sound’s descriptive meaning—how it tends to be interpreted—and its normative meaning—how it ought, aesthetically speaking, to be interpreted. I reductively analyze both concepts in terms of hearing a sound as something else. I then argue against two alternative proposals; descriptive musical meaning can be analyzed neither in terms of resemblance nor in terms of musicians’ communicative intentions.
Conference Posters
Selected participants presented their research posters, sparking vibrant discussion.
