Sprache — Musik — Bild

Abstract

Characteristic similarities and differences of language, music, and visual art are shown to depend to a large extent on the types of sign systems they rely on. Two major aspects of signs are explored: the nature of their physical signal and the relation between the signal and its meaning, characterized in terms of Peirce’s concept of iconic and symbolic signs. Language, music and pictures are all based on the possibility to combine constituent parts into signs of unlimited complexity. Their compositional principles are radically different, though. Physical signals of language and music are basically acoustic, time-dependent, and linear, while signals of pictures is visual, two-dimensional, and permanent. This has far-reaching consequences for the different combinatorial properties. Equally important are the differences deriving from the types of signs, with icons based on similarity between signal and meaning, and symbols relating signals to their meaning by convention. Natural languages must thus be conceived as combinatorial systems of symbols, which, because of their conventional character, have access to all aspects of conceptually organized experience. Music and visual art, on the other hand, are iconic systems, the meaning of which is subject to structural similarity with the signal representing it. Under this perspective, the meaning of music is to be construed as consisting of affective attitudes and processes structured by what might be called the Gestural Form, just as the meaning of linguistic expressions is made up from conceptually organized experiences structured by Logical or Semantic Form. The interaction of language and music is highlighted by looking at a short composition of Hanns Eisler. Finally, pictures must be seen as clearly iconic signs, involving two different aspects of meaning, however: referential meaning relates visual representations to largely external phenomena, while expressive meaning relates them to internal conditions, comparable to the affective attitudes represented in music. The proportion of these two aspects varies in different modes of visual art.