Musical semantics: Dimensions, processes, and neural correlates Stefan Koelsch Abstract Processing of meaning is critical for language perception, and therefore the majority of research on meaning processing has focused on the semantic, lexical, conceptual, and propositional processing of language. However, music is another a means of communi-cation, and meaning also emerges from the interpretation of musical information. This article provides a framework of musical semantics, in which seven categories of musical meaning are speci ed: meaning emerging from iconic, indexical, and symbolic sign qual-ities of music (these three categories are also referred to as extra-musical meaning), intra-musical meaning (emerging from relations between musical elements), as well as three categories of musicogenic meaning: physical, emotional, and personal musicogenic meaning (emerging from physical, emotional, and personality-related effects elicited by music). Neuroscience studies are reviewed investigating the processing of extra- and in-tramusical meaning. These studies reveal two neural correlates of meaning processing, the so-called N400 and the N5 (which are both components of the event-related electric brain potential). I argue that the N400 can be elicited by musical stimuli due to the pro-cessing of extra-musical meaning, whereas the N5 can be elicited due to the processing of intra-musical meaning. Notably, whereas the N400 can be elicited by both linguistic and musical stimuli, the N5 has so far only been observed for the processing of meaning in music. This is one example of how knowledge about the processing of musical mean-ing can advance our understanding of how the human brain processes meaning informa-tion in general.Introduction To communicate, an individual has to utter information that can be interpreted and understood by another individual. This article deals with neural correlates of the processing of meaning emerging from the interpretation of musical information by an individual. Theoretically, it is important to differentiate the “meaning of music” (in the sense of “how does a musical system work with regard to its capability of