Musical semantics: Dimensions, processes, and neural correlates 117 language – is important to understand how the human brain processes meaning in-formation.Conclusion This article presents a framework of musical semantics (in which seven categories of musical meaning are speci ed) and a neurobiological theory of musical meaning. I suggest that two different classes of musical meaning are mediated by different cog-nitive processes, and refected in different event-related brain potentials (the N400 refecting processing of extra-musical meaning and the N5 refecting processing of intra-musical meaning). The data presented in this article show that music can com-municate meaning, notably not only meaning related to emotion, or affect, but iconic, indexical, and symbolic meaning (with regard to extra-musical meaning), as well as intra-musical meaning. The data also show that musical meaning is at least partly processed with the same mechanisms as meaning in language. Therefore, the notion that language and music are strictly separate domains with regard to the pro-cessing of meaning is, in my view, not tenable. The fact that (a) musical information can prime representations of meaningful (extra-musical) concepts, (b) that in-tra-musical meaning can emerge from structural relations, and (c) that musical meaning can emerge from musical discourse, implies that musical 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 storage, activation, and selection of repre-sentations of meaningful concepts, as well as integration of the semantic informa-tion of these representations with the previous semantic context. Notably, the N5 as an index of the processing of meaning emerging from structural relations has so far only been reported for music; therefore, music – and not only language – is import-ant to understand how meaning emerges from the interpretation of information in the human brain.Acknowledgements I thank W. A. Siebel, Martin Rohrmeier, Ian Cross, and Uli Reich for helpful discus-sion.References Alperson p. (1994). What is music? An introduction to the philosophy of music. Pennsylvania State University Press.Aramaki M., Marie C., Kronland-Martinet R., Ystad S. & Besson M. (2010). Sound categoriza-tion and conceptual priming for nonlinguistic and linguistic sounds. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 22: 2555–2569.Besson M., Frey A. & Aramaki M. (2011). Is the distinction between intra- and extra-musical meaning implemented in the brain? (Comment). Physics of Life Reviews, 8(2): 112–113.