Musical semantics: Dimensions, processes, and neural correlates 97 ures for imitating, or portraying (and thus, according to the Affektenlehre, summon-ing) individual emotions, and aimed at differentiating the relationships between the various individual elements of musical form and technique as well as individual af-fections such as joy, sadness, love, hate, despair, desire, and admiration. In the 19th century, Hanslick (1854) introduced the term expression (in contrast to the concept of imitation), with the controversial claim that instrumental music cannot express de -nite emotions (for an extensive discussion see, e. g., Davies, 1994). After Hanslick, several theorists dealt with the issue of explaining “art’s expressiveness as arising from artists’ expressing their concurrent emotions or feelings in the production of art” (although rarely with regard to music, see Davies, 1994, p. 170; Davies also provides a detailed account on what he refers to as “expression theory”).With regard to the expression of emotions, Juslin & Laukka (2003) compared in a meta analysis the acoustical signs of emotional expression in music and speech, showing that the acoustic properties that code emotional expression in speech are highly similar to those coding these expressions in music. Correspondingly, a study by Fritz et al. (2009) showed that the expression of joy, sadness, and fearfulness in tonal music can be recognized universally: In that study, participants from the Mafa people [Mafa] (a native African population living in Northern Cameroon), who pre-sumably had never heard Western tonal music before they participated in the ex-periment, were presented with musical stimuli (tonal music) expressing joy, sad-ness, and fearfulness. The Mafa participants recognized the emotional expression of the stimuli clearly above chance level, indicating that the expression of at least of some “basic” emotions in tonal music can be recognized universally.1 These ndings parallel the universal recognition of facial (Ekman, 1999) and vocal (Scherer 1995) expression of emotion.Interestingly, the music of the Mafa does not imitate emotions (although music is always joyful for them). Thus, the conception of music imitating emotions is not universal (but dependent on the use of music in a culture). However, the Mafa also use music to index the physical tness of a player (in addition to the use of music for group coordination in rituals, as well as for other social functions): Playing their futes (usually along with dancing or running) is strenuous, involving rapid in- and exhalation, “and a good physical tness is regarded as a precondition to engaging in this activity which can last for several hours” (supplemental material of Fritz at al., 2009). The duration of playing indexes the physical tness of a player (and the Mafa appreciate powerful, long-lasting music performances; Fritz et al., 2009). Such in-dexical sign quality of musical signals has motivated one hypothesis for an adaptive function of music: The sexual selection model. This model dates back to Darwin (1874), who suggested, by analogy with birdsong, that “musical notes and rhythm were rst acquired by the male or female progenitors of mankind for the sake of charming the opposite sex” (ibid., p. 477). Darwin’s supposition has often been re-1 Performance of Western listeners was signi cantly better than performance of Mafa, suggesting that the recognition of emotion in (tonal) music due to the understanding of indexical musical sign quality is also infuenced by cultural experience.