Musical semantics: Dimensions, processes, and neural correlates 95 municated by other individuals in general) is usually multi-dimensional. That is, during music listening or music performance, meaning can emerge from several sources simultaneously. For example, while listening to a symphonic poem, mean-ing may emerge from the interpretation of extra-musical sign qualities, from the processing of the intra-musical structure, and from music-evoked (musicogenic) emotions. An example for spoken language is that the meaning of an utterance is decoded not only from the meaning of the words but also from the (affective) pros-ody.Moreover, the term musical semantics is used in this article (instead of simply us-ing the terms ‘musical meaning’ or ‘musical semiotics’) to emphasize that musical meaning extends beyond musical sign qualities: For example, with regard to in-tra-musical meaning, musical meaning can emerge from structural relations between successive elements. Another example, with regard to extra-musical mean-ing, is that during listening to program music processing of extra-musical meaning usually involves integration of meaningful information into a semantic context. Note, however, that the term musical semantics does not refer to binary (true-false) truth conditions. I agree with U. Reich (2011) that no musical tradition makes use of quanti ers (e. g., ‘all’, ‘some’, ‘none’, ‘always’), modals (e. g., ‘must’, ‘may’, neces-sary’), or connectives (e. g., ‘and’, ‘if…then’, ’if and only if’, ‘neither…nor’), unless music imitates language (such as drum and whistle languages; Stern, 1957). Hence, the term ‘musical semantics’ should not be equated with the term ’propositional se-mantics’ as it is used in linguistics (this issue is discussed further at the end of this article).extra-musical intra-muscial musicogenic iconic indexical symbolic physical emotional personal Table 1: Synopsis of the dimensions of musical meaning.Extra-musical meaning Extra-musical meaning emerges from the interpretation of musical information with reference to the extra-musical world. Leonard (Meyer, 1956) referred to this class of mu-sical meanings as designative meaning, Nattiez (1990) music as extrinsic referring (for an overview see Koopman & Daviex, 2001). Extra-musical meaning comprises three dimensions: musical meaning due to (1) iconic, (2) indexical, and (3) symbolic sign qualities of music. These sign-qualities are reminiscent of those introduced by Charles Sanders Peirce (although not with reference to music; Peirce, 1931/1958), and were (to my knowledge) rst applied to music by Vladimir Karbusicky (1986).Iconic musical meaning emerges from (the interpretation of) musical patterns or forms (e. g., musical sound patterns) that resemble sounds of objects, qualities of ob-jects, or even qualities of abstract concepts. For example, a musical passage may sound “like a bird”, “like a thunderstorm”, “like wideness”, etc., and acoustic