Musical Meaning and the Musicology of Record Production

This article proposes a methodological framework for the analysis of recorded popular music that draws upon ecological perception, embodied cognition, metaphor and systems theory. It further proposes that the theoretical gap between a creator's intentions and an audience's interpretations can be bridged through two basic mechanisms. The first is that the combination of the experience of embodiment in human form and the consistent physical laws of our environment provide common and consistent experiences and interpretations of certain phenomena. The second is that certain social phenomena can be examined through the notion of many layers of overlapping communities who share culturally specific interpretations based on their specific environment, language, creative practice and social history.