Mihailo Antovic (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Schemas, primitives, grounds: Conceptualization of music as a vehicle to unlocking the way humans construct meaning

This talk presents my group’s research program on the conceptualization of music. Focusing on phenomena such as musical scales which “go upward” in some languages, yet “become smaller”, “thinner” or “lighter” in others, we investigate if such differences imply that musical concepts are strongly culturally grounded, or if some underlying similarities may still be proposed. To this end, we have conducted a series of studies asking young participants to describe isolated musical elements or short musical excerpts in controlled settings (Serbian, Roma, US, musically trained and untrained, sighted and congenitally blind children), to assess the appropriateness of visual animations following simple musical percepts on rating scales (musician and non-musician university students), and to describe excerpts from programmatic musical pieces containing such elements, with or without prior prompts (non-musician adults). Results overwhelmingly suggest that participants construct musical concepts based not on strong experiential clues (e.g. familiarity with notation systems or the way the concept is called in their language) but rather on more abstract properties inferable from the percepts on an underlying semantic level, e.g. interlocked combinations of schematic elements such as MAGNITUDE, FORCE, or PATH. This in turn puts to question the all-out revival of radical relativism in both linguistics and cognitive psychology and calls for a more balanced incorporation of universal and culturally-induced factors in musical concept construction. In turn, this may have implications for methodological debates across several fields – from music cognition to cognitive semantics.

Mihailo Antovic teaches cognitive linguistics in the Department of English, Faculty of Philosophy, and heads the Center for Cognitive Sciences at the University of Niš, Serbia. His main research is on connections between music and language, especially with regard to the problem of meaning. He has presented related papers and given invited talks in Austria, Bulgaria, Greece, the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia, Slovakia, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. He was a Fulbright visiting scholar at Case Western Reserve University and research scholar at the University of Freiburg, and is currently Humboldt senior research fellow at Humboldt University in Berlin. His articles have appeared in numerous journals (e.g. Metaphor and Symbol, Language and Communication, Language and Literature, Cognitive Semiotics, Musicae Scientiae, Music Perception, Psychology of Music). In addition to several contributions to international edited volumes (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, John Benjamins, Oxford University Press), he has also co-edited a volume on oral poetics and cognitive science for De Gruyter. He is currently writing a monograph commissioned by Routledge entitled Multilevel Grounding: A Theory of Musical Meaning.

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