116 Stefan Koelsch sion of emotion has created confusion, because he implicitly wrote about intra-musical meaning, whereas expression of emotion due to (extra-musical) in-dexical sign quality belongs to a different dimension of musical meaning (for details about Hanslick’s argument see, e. g., Davies, 1994; Cumming, 1994). Another ex-ample is that Scruton (1983) aims at making statements about intra-musical mean-ing, but that the perception of successive pitches with increasing and decreasing fundamental frequency as upward- and downward-movement is due to extra-musi-cal sign quality (although Scruton’s theory, at least implicitly, aims at describing in-tra-musical meaning).9 This has important theoretical implications, for two reasons: Firstly, meaning emerging from extra-musical sign qualities does not require a “metaphorical transference of ideas” (as claimed by Scruton, 1983, 1999), but mainly mere semantic priming (for a critical account on Scruton’s use of the term “meta-phor” see Cumming, 1994). For example, hearing the words “doctor”, “nurse”, “scalpel” activates representations of related concepts such as “hospital” due to se-mantic priming (i.e., not due to a metaphorical transference of ideas); similarly, suc-cessive tones with increasing pitch prime the representation of the concept “up-ward”. Secondly, the use of the term metaphorical meaning (or metaphorical transfer-ence of ideas) is appropriate with regard to intra-musical structural properties, such as “breach” and “confict”, because intra-musical structural properties might prime representations of such concepts, although the music does not sound, e. g., like a breach (that is, there are no cracking noises and the like). However, “breach” and “confict” are extra-musical concepts, and therefore their meaning is different from intra-musical meaning (and so are their musicogenic effects, such as perceived “ten-sion”). The neurobiological theory of musical meaning presented in this article sug-gests that music can communicate meaning, notably not only meaning related to emotion, or affect, but iconic, indexical, and symbolic meaning (with regard to ex-tra-musical meaning), as well as intra-musical meaning. The data presented in this article indicate that extra-musical meaning is at least partly processed with the same mechanisms as meaning in language (as refected in the N400). Therefore, the notion that language and music are strictly separate, non-overlapping domains with regard to the processing of meaning does not seem to make sense. The fact that music can communicate intra-musical meaning (as refected in the N5) also implies that mu-sical meaning is not only a matter of semiotics (i.e., not only a matter of the sign qualities of music), but a matter of semantics that includes integration of meaning-ful information with a semantic context. Notably, neural correlates of such meaning processing have so far not been shown for language; therefore, music – and not only 9 The association of high/low pitches with the concepts “high”/”low” is presumably a mixture of (a) iconic sign quality, mainly due to the position of the larynx being higher (if the individual is standing or sitting) during the production of tones with higher pitches compared to lower pitches, and (b) pos -sibly symbolic sign quality, due to the cultural shaping of the association of high/low pitches with the concepts “high”/”low”: Lawrence Zbikowski (1998)noted that Greek music theorists of antiquity used the terms “sharpness” and “heaviness”, that in Bali and Java the terms “small” and “large” are used, and that the Suyá of the Amazon basin use the terms “young” and “old” to refer to high and low pitches (ibid., p. 5). This does not rule out, however, that those peoples would also agree that high/low pitches are “high”/”low”, and that in Western listeners high and low pitch information also primes representations of concepts such as “sharp/heavy”, “small/large”, and “young/old”.