The listener as an adaptive device: An ecological and biosemiotical approach to musical semantics

摘要

Music can be considered as an ontological category – as something “out there” – but also as something that calls forth epistemological assumptions and listening strategies. Listening, in fact, relies on music knowledge that must be generated as a tool for adaptation to the sonic world. It is the listener who makes sense of music, somewhat analogous to an organism that makes sense of its environment. Listening strategies, on this view, can be defined as interactions between the listener as an organism and the music as environment. This interactional approach calls forth the biological roots of musical epistemology and the key concept of adaptation.