Search parameters

Analytical method of aesthetician Leonard B. Meyer based on information theory, which views styles as "culturally conditioned systems of expectations, and of musical meaning as deriving from the arousing, frustrating and fulfilling of such expectations." In his redefinition of meaning in music, Meyer "fashioned three stages of what he called 'embodied meaning': the 'hypothetical meaning' before a sound-pattern has been heard, the 'evident meaning' when the sound-pattern has become a concrete event which initiates a stage of 'revaluation' comparable with 'feedback' in control systems, and the 'determinate meaning' that arises later in the total experience." (New Grove)