Analogous sonic archetypal representation: Symbolic lineage in syntactic modal structures

Abstract

The lineage systems of musical meaning trace themselves to antiquity. Through lines of compositional use, emotional connotation, and symbolic meaning can be discovered through topics and experimentation that reveals common representations throughout different traditions. Music brings feelings. Music expresses and symbolizes relationships between disparate topics. Music reveals identity. To address a small portion of this potentially massive inquiry, this dissertation attempts to discretize the experience of Mode as a symbol that informs archetypal representation of value, meaning, and analogous experience. Most listeners can declare one or more feelings when listening to music, but it is not enough to say that music induces emotions. Rather, we must identify if there are any large order structures of emotional or symbolic-emotional understanding that is translated from sonic object to listener. These larger structures are referred to in other fields as archetypes. Through experimentation and following the symbolic through-line of esoteric philosophies of antiquity, this dissertation reveals a functional framework for the repository of narrative, symbolic, meaning in music through the analogous sonic archetypal representation (ASAR).