This essay is an attempt to understand the reasons for the current crisis of musical aesthetics. It examines the function of this discipline as the mediator between philosophy and musicology, it inquires into its connections with the ideals of autonomy, beauty and free subjectivity. During the 20th Century, major changes in society and their communication forms happened; anthropology and semiotics began to compete with aesthetics in explaining musical facts. The last paragraphs test the chances of resistance of musical aesthetics ; (...) musical meaning appears to be the only question which endured in spite of the considerable fragmentation and loss of profile of musical experience. (shrink)

Tone semantics is a psychoacoustic-based theory of gestalt perception that deals with tone perception and the assignment of functional relationships between tones in the musical context. The theory provides an operational account of semantics in terms of complex dynamic systems theory and forms the basis for non-symbolic research in music imagination. This is illustrated by an application in the automatic recognition of tone centers from acoustical input. An analysis of the basic concepts and related epistemological and methodological principles reveals a (...) promising paradigm for music research. (shrink)