Project Descriptions

2. Intermediality

            Intermediality

Viewing music as information not only gives us interesting synergies between the philosophy of music and the technologies of MIR and VR but also with other humanistic disciplines that deal with information in other forms. Just as music plays and can play an important role in our development of competences, culture and, more generally, the understanding of mankind, the same has been said of other media such as literature.

Lars Ole Sauerberg has pioneered much work in the field of intermediality – the study of the complex ways in which different media – in his case, literature and music – reach into each other’s natural provinces of meaning production and conveyance to produce hybrid semiotic structures of multi-layered signification. Particularly interesting with regard to Sauerberg – himself an accomplished amateur musician – is that the music-text vector points in the opposite direction to that which is commonplace: we are not unaccustomed to the way in which text informs music, as in the case of libretti or – less nobly – song lyrics. Lars Ole investigates the ways in which textual reference to music and the experience of it informs literary narrative. Such research is of vital importance to the research program The Aesthetics of Music and Sound, as it further concretizes the ways in which the study of music informs our understanding of other cultural and cognitive activities.

(Lars Ole Sauerberg)

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