Read the following passage regarding the philosophy of musical expressiveness:
In the philosophy of aesthetics, explaining how purely instrumental music—lacking semantic content, linguistic syntax, or representational visual elements—can possess profound emotional expressiveness remains a vexing ontological problem. How can a mere sequence of organized acoustic vibrations be accurately described as "melancholic" or "triumphant"? Scholars have proposed several competing frameworks to resolve this paradox, each relying on distinct underlying mechanisms of emotional attribution.
The Arousalist account posits a purely causal, stimulus-response relationship: music is expressive of sadness solely in virtue of its disposition to elicit a psychological state of sadness in a receptive, properly situated listener. The emotion resides not within the acoustic object, but as a reactionary state within the subject. Critics, however, note the "paradox of negative emotion"—listeners actively seek out "sad" music, suggesting the evoked state is arguably not genuine sadness, which is characteristically aversive, but rather a distinct aesthetic pleasure.
Conversely, the Contour Theory isolates a structural isomorphism between musical dynamics and the human behavioral manifestations of emotion. Under this view, a musical passage is "sad" because its acoustic features—such as slow tempi, descending melodic lines, and subdued dynamics—share a morphological resemblance to the physical gait, vocal prosody, and kinetic lethargy of a grieving person. The music does not necessarily make us sad; rather, we perceive the sonic contour of sadness just as we might recognize a sad posture in a silhouette.
A third approach, the Persona Theory, demands an act of imaginative projection. It contends that listeners implicitly postulate a fictional agent—an indefinite persona—whose psychological narrative is unfolding through the musical progression. Expressiveness here relies not on structural resemblance per se, but on the listener's active, empathetic engagement with this imagined subjectivity. The listener hears the music as the outward expression of this phantom agent's inner life.
Finally, the Conventionalist paradigm rejects inherent causal or structural linkages altogether, arguing that emotional attribution in music operates essentially as an arbitrary linguistic system. Through repeated cultural conditioning within specific historical traditions, specific musical tropes become semiotically bound to specific affects. Thus, musical expressiveness is neither physically symptomatic nor empathetically imagined, but rather syntactically decoded by those fluent in the cultural idiom.
Based on the theoretical frameworks presented in the passage, match each theory of musical expressiveness to the hypothetical scenario from an outside domain that relies on a fundamentally parallel conceptual mechanism.
- The Arousalist accountA landscape architect designs a memorial garden using jagged stones and chaotic pathways specifically because traversing this environment reliably induces a visceral feeling of anxiety in visitors.
- The Contour TheoryA robotics engineer programs an AI's synthetic voice to convey exhaustion by lowering its pitch and slowing its processing output speed to strictly mimic the biological symptoms of human fatigue.
- The Persona TheoryA reader of a highly abstract, plotless poem finds the arrangement of words deeply poignant because they naturally envision an unseen, grieving narrator speaking the lines, despite the text lacking any identified speaker.
- The Conventionalist paradigmAn anthropologist notes that a society uses abstract geometric tattoos to convey mourning exclusively because community members have historically agreed to associate those specific shapes with funerals, despite the shapes having no inherent visual sadness.