Multilevel Grounding : Routledge : 9781032282602 : 1032282606 : 25 Sep 2023 : Multilevel Grounding develops a new approach to musical meaning-Multilevel-Grounded Semantics, addressing the well- known paradox that music seems full of meaning yet there is little consensus among listeners on what exactly it is that this meaning communicates. Offering a balance between formalist and referentialist approaches, Antovi c 's theory proposes that musical signifi cation emerges from constant cross- space mappings between the musical structure and the listener's experience. The process is crucially constrained by several hierarchical and partly recursive levels of grounding: perceptual, schematically embodied, affective, conceptual, culturally elaborated, and individual. These levels are responsible for a range of phenomena that increase in complexity, from involuntary bodily responses to the manipulation of musical expectancies over cross- modal inferences relating the musical parameters to spat