Contemporary musical rhetoric: inquiry, delimitation and schematisation

Abstract

Since its genesis, music has great importance on the rituals and processes which makes humanity a sociocultural entity. Nowadays this cultural tool is used to achieve several communicational ends. In art, entertainment or in marketing, music inarguably awakes emotions in its audience. The study of this emotional field regards to rhetoric - a theoretical scheme which analyses the persuasive tools in a speech. One of the several elements, or persuasive proofs, which this discipline inquiries, alludes to the emotional or passional basis. Everything that concerns the emotions lies in the pathos sphere - one of the three main pillars of rhetoric. Our study resides right in this correlation of pathos with music. Despite the obvious relationship of this sound-emotional bond, when it comes to the rhetorical effects of music in an audience this matter is little explored. Once this subject is poorly studied, a huge scientific gap remains untouched by rhetoric. Our main objective is to unveil the previously cited bond in order to scientifically systematize what we call as contemporary musical rhetoric. To do so, we will carry an exploratory study in which the two main fields, music and rhetoric, will be linked; in addition to a population study. Through this practical approach, a protocol will be given to subjects exposed to music sessions. In these music sessions, the participants will note down their emotional and contextual experiences on the protocol while they listen to several music pieces. The protocols will compose the corpus in which we will carry the analysis to evidence the emotional signs left by music in the psyche. Furthermore, the whole study will be based on the scientific paradigm (discussed by Carlo Ginzburg) which deals with the investigative path to understanding a particular phenomenon through the signs left by it. With this methodological path, we expect to systematize, to delimitate and to schematize the contemporary musical rhetoric. (AU)