This project investigates how musical meaning can be understood within a naturalistic framework. Music is often described as non-referential or abstract, yet it reliably evokes emotion, supports social bonding, and functions in communication. Existing theories of musical meaning often emphasize either subjective affect, cultural convention, or formal structure, while leaving underexplored the evolutionary and functional foundations of musical understanding.

The project develops a teleosemantic account of musical meaning. Teleosemantics explains content in terms of biological and functional roles: a signal or representational structure carries content partly because of the function it has acquired within a system. Applying this framework to music makes it possible to ask how musical expressions may carry natural content without necessarily referring to discrete external objects or propositions.
The central hypothesis is that musical meaning arises across three interrelated levels. At the biological level, music builds on evolved expressive capacities such as vocal prosody, affective intonation, rhythmic entrainment, and emotional signaling. At the cultural level, musical practices, genres, and conventions stabilize and transmit shared emotional, social, and ritual meanings through enculturation. At the cognitive level, listeners process musical structures through perception, memory, expectation, emotion, imagery, and embodied simulation.
The aim of the project is to integrate these levels into a philosophical account of music as a natural-content-bearing system. The project draws on philosophy of biology, philosophy of mind, cognitive science, aesthetics, evolutionary theories of communication, and recent work on representation and predictive processing. During the KLI stay, the goal is to refine this framework through dialogue with researchers working on evolution, cognition, agency, communication, and the biological foundations of mental life, and to prepare an article on music as natural content.