Abstract
Chomsky’s distinction between descriptive and explanatory theoretical adequacy is discussed, and his emphasis on “Universal Grammar” as the criterion for assessing linguistic explanatory adequacy is criticized (Sect. 2.1). Communication is deemed a primary principle for assessing proto-tonal explanatory adequacy (Sect. 2.2). Additional principles are termed “economical,” “categorical,” and “maximalist” (Sect. 2.3). Finally, in Sect. 2.4 formalities are established for handling “event sequences” and relationships between different types thereof, for example note sequences and pitch sequences.
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Notes
- 1.
Chomsky (ibid., p. 57) is rather uncomfortable with “… Searle’s concept of ‘communication’ as including communication with oneself, that is, thinking in words.” “… I agree with Searle that there is an essential connection between language and communication once we take ‘communication’ in his broader sense—an unfortunate move, I believe, since the notion ‘communication’ is now deprived of its essential and interesting character.” However, as we shall see in Sect. 6.4, musical self-communication can be a highly interesting form of communication, with far-reaching structural ramifications.
- 2.
It is difficult to disagree with Molino (1975, p. 47, quoted in translation in Lidov 2005, p. 86), that “nothing guarantees a direct correspondence between the effect produced by a work of art and the intentions of its creator. Every symbolic object presumes an exchange in which producer and consumer, sender and receiver are not interchangeable and have different perspectives on this object which they hardly conceive in the same way.” I believe, nonetheless, that despite the lack of guarantee of success, human beings are communication seekers.
- 3.
The terms “interpersonal communication” and “intrapersonal communication” originate with Ruesch and Bateson (1951, pp. 15–16).
- 4.
Thus X is the order-preserving bijection from the ordered multiset s onto the ordered multiset t.
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Agmon, E. (2013). Preliminaries. In: The Languages of Western Tonality. Computational Music Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39587-1_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39587-1_2
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