What are musical emotions? A proposal for a functional–teleosemantic approach

Abstract

Listeners frequently report that instrumental music — apparently lacking explicit semantic or referential content — elicits profound emotional responses such as sadness, joy or awe. Eduard Hanslick (Hanslick, [1854] 1986) famously claimed that music’s essence lies in “tonally moving forms,” denying that emotions reside in a musical work. By contrast, Susanne Langer (Langer, 1953) argued that music “presents the forms of feeling,” suggesting that its intangible structures embody the dynamic ‘shapes’ of emotion. This paper proposes a functional–teleosemantic account of musical emotion, drawing on the work of Ruth Millikan (Millikan, 1984), Karen Neander (Neander, 2017), and Nicholas Shea (Shea, 2018). The central claim is that musical emotions emerge as biological and cultural functions — musical forms acquire stable emotive meaning when their repeated use in contexts such as funerals or celebrations explains their continued reproduction. By synthesising insights from philosophy of music, cognitive science and evolutionary theory, I argue that musical motifs can mea n sorrow or joy if their systematic, culturally valued use in eliciting affective states allows for their persistence. This teleosemantic account aims to reconcile Hanslick’s emphasis on pure musical form with Langer’s notion of music as a symbolic presentation of feeling, while accommodating criticisms from Paul Griffiths (Griffiths, 1997) and Lisa Feldman Barrett (Barrett, 2006) regarding the heterogeneous and constructed nature of emotion. Musical emotions, therefore, are best understood as functions within a cultural and biological lineage. Tonal patterns first become stable emotive signals — and ultimatelysymbols — precisely because they reliably serve a valued role over time.