The Emotional Meaning of Pure Music

Music can have extrinsic and/or intrinsic meaning. The former is relevant in the case of program music. The latter conforms to pure (absolute) music, i.e. music that can be understood without reference to extrinsic sources. Taking the intrinsic content of music as basic, we must ask about its nature. I propose to identify it with aesthetic emotion. As tonal music is organized by series of chords relative to the context of a tonal scale, the question is how music forms can be mapped onto aesthetic emotions. I propose to ground the analysis on a two-dimensional space of emotions, where one dimension refers to arousal (activity) and the other dimension refers to valence. Relating valence with consonance and arousal with entropic uncertainty leads to an account which directly relates structural and probabilistic aspects of tonal music with its affective content. The present bare-bone semantics of pure music proposes an explicit modeling of the affective response based on an algebraic meaning conception.