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Semiotic analysis of music by Jean-Jacques Nattiez, head of the Groupe de Recherches en Semiologie Musicale at the University of Montreal. "Semiotic analysis of music is intended as a branch on a general science called 'semiology'--that is, the study of signs...[which concentrates] on what music means and the way in which musical structures embody or communicate meaning; but the whole business of musical meaning is so difficult to handle that in practice a different approach is required. This approach is rather like how linguistics analyze speech: first, by deciding what the building-blocks of linguistic meaning are; and, second, by investigating how these building-blocks are related to each other in any particular example of speech. In the same way, analyzing a piece of music semiotically means, first, chopping it up into units possessing some degree of significance within the piece; and, second, analyzing the way in which these are distributed throughout the piece, with a view to discovering the principles that govern this distribution." (Nicholas Cook, A Guide to Musical Analysis)