Stefan Koelsch has chosen a hard problem in exploring the responses of listeners to aspects of meaning in western common-practice period tonal-harmonic music. This is a highly culturally-particularized art-music that has accreted strata of discursive significance likely to condition its experience in ways that are intimately bound to the history of western culture. Music rooted in tonal dynamics is interwoven into the fabric of contemporary life in multifarious and disparate strands and in various stylistic manifestations, serving a range of functions from modulation of affective and associative responses in narrative contexts (as in film and advertisements), through framing the timing of joint action (as in dance, or marching in step), through managing and coordinating collective attentional focus and affect (as in singing or playing together), to serving as a focus for subcultural affiliation (as, e.g., in peer-to-peer file-sharing). As an auditory stimulus, it may carry traces of all these functions simultaneously for a listener, and the meanings that it may bear for any individual are likely to be as multifarious as its manifestations and functions.
Philosophers have dealt with this complexity variously; Koopman and Davies [1], to whom Koelsch refers, suggest that music's meanings are best interpreted as experiential, but that they have some "objective" aspects, largely consisting in [1, p. 264] the "coherent dynamic content the listener discovers by focusing on the music's formal progress". They state [1, p. 265] that "Music's meaning . . . is an objective property of the music, because there is agreement in the relevant judgments of suitably qualified listeners under appropriate conditions". The identity of "suitably qualified listeners" then comes into play in determining who is qualified to weigh music's meanings; these might range from a few connoisseurs to the entirety of an enculturated population. Koopman and Davies do propose that other types of musical meaning are likely to exist, more variable and subjective than those deriving from music's "coherent dynamic content"; they postulate that the experience of music gives rise to a kind of private meaning or "meaning-for-thesubject" that is personal and existential and that will be largely individual, though it may be partly shared in social and group contexts where common commitments and motivations allow these personal meanings to converge.
Objective musical meaning-"musical connectedness from point to point" [1, p. 266], or "intra-musical meaning"-is one principal focus of the research outlined here; Koelsch and his collaborators have shown that an ERAN ERP response (with a post-stimulus latency of around 120-200 ms) appears bound to syntactic music processing, while an N5 response (latency of 500 ms) appears to reflect semantic processes that are tied to aspects of music-structural integration. These findings fit well with recent music theories that have been applied to the cognition of tonal music [2], elucidating at the neural level the ways in which constituent elements of that music depend on their