96 Stefan Koelsch events may sound “warm”, “round”, “sharp”, “colourful”, etc. The acoustic proper-ties of such sound qualities, however, have not been speci ed yet. Examples for the use of iconic sign quality in Western music include the imitation of the sound of an animal’s voice (e. g., dog barking in the 2nd mov. of the “Spring” of Vivaldi’s Le quattro stagioni), of the qualities of an animal (e. g., large and heavy sounding tones resemble an elephant in the 5th mov. of Saint-Saens’ Le carnaval des animaux), weather-related sounds (e. g., a thunderstorm in the 4th mov. of Beethoven’s Pasto-rale, or in the “Summer” of Haydn’s Die Jahreszeiten), sounds related to a landscape (e. g., “Die Moldau” of Smetana’s Ma vlast), qualities of a ctional being (e. g., a gnome in Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition), etc. The use of iconic sign quality in music is one form of tone painting, the other form of tone painting uses indexical sign quality (see below). Note that Susanne Langer (1942, 1953) used the term “icon-ic” for what is referred to in the next section as “indexical musical meaning”. With regard to language, the iconic sign-quality of the sound of a word that imitates the sound of the object or action the word refers to, is referred to as onomatopoeic.Indexical musical meaning emerges from (action-related) sound patterns that index the presence of a psychological state of an individual, for example the presence of an emotion, or the presence of an intention. That is, in contrast to iconic musical meaning, indexical musical meaning refers to signs that do not signal the presence of something that is inherent in the sign itself (like “smoke indicating the presence of re”; Peirce, 1931/1958). In Western music, indexical musical meaning usually emerges from the imitation of expressions signalling the psychological state of an individual, such as an emotion, a mood, or an intention (imitation of such expres-sions is the other form of tone painting). Such expressions are inherently action-related (for example, vocalizations are produced by the vocal apparatus, gestures by skeletal muscles).Stephen Davies (1994) uses the term “intentional use of natural signi cance” (ibid., pp. 29–32) for indexical sign quality. This distinction is theoretically valid and useful for the description of how a musical system can serve to convey meaning in-formation, but as mentioned above, this article will also consider the psychological reality that musical information is interpreted by a listener, regardless of whether or not a producer of a signal intended to convey a speci c meaning emerging from in-dexical (or any other) sign quality. Ian Cross (2009) refers to this dimension of mu-sical meaning as “motivational-structural” (in reference to Owings & Morton, 1998) due to the relationship between affective-motivational states of individuals on the one side, and the structural-acoustical characteristics of (species-speci c) vocaliza-tions on the other. For example, in a stressed individual, the vocal tract contracts, leading to a higher degree of acoustic roughness in vocalizations as compared to a vocalization uttered in a relaxed state. Susanne Langer used the term “iconic” for what is referred to here as indexical musical meaning (Langer, 1942,1953).Historically, concrete descriptions of emotional expression in music composi-tions were already formulated in the Affektenlehre (Theory of Affections) of the seventeenth century. The Affektenlehre prescribed certain musical methods and g-