The psychology of music in search of musical meaning

Leading up to the arrangement of the Musikwissenschaft (1885), psychology — separately in sentiment and Affektenlehre — was listed among the disciplines of systematics, but it was Francès (La perception de la musique, 1958) who genuinely initiated musical psychology. Understanding the art of sound was profiled in three working hypotheses, as dependent: (i) on knowledge of structure (analytical approach); (ii) by its context (analytical-historical-social approximation); (iii) from potentially communicative meaning (interpretive-analytical positioning). Berlyne investigated the close connection between Aesthetics and Psychobiology (1971) in an attempt to individualize the physiological basis of judgmental taste. Imberty (Les écritures du temps, 1981) embarked on the next phase of sensory epistemology in search of psychological semantics that enables the penetration of the phonetic fact through the comprehensive perspective of existing perspectives. It thus turns out that the potential sense that can be imparted to the acoustic image is only partially subjective, since interpretation is profoundly influenced by both behavioral schemas and cultural conventions