ABSTRACT
When we seek to account for the extensive data provided by semantic judgments, we encounter difficulties that are inherent in the analysis of a complex reality in which the variables arc never isolated but coexist in mutual interaction. Even if we limited ourselves to monodic music, we would undoubtedly observe that the examples selected would change character when transposed to a higher or lower register or when played softly or loudly, in one timbre or another. Experiments that involve the simplest stimuli—isolated tones—provide useful and solid data owing to their restriction of the number of variables, and so they can be relied on. But they are of only indirect relevance to music. I have tried, in the selection of certain of the examples, to find relatively simple structures in which one of the variables (melodic gesture, pitch register, intensity) could be set off distinctly, if not perfectly, isolated. In that, and in taking advantage of the infrequent semantic phenomena given acoustically, I felt I had established well-founded relationships between the contents of the sounds and the subjects' responses. In other fragments there was a complex dialectic involving content that was tempting to analyze, with all its multiple aspects—their compatibilities, their mutual reinforcements, their antagonisms.
