بررسی سیالیت مفهوم موسیقی در پژوهش‌های میان‌رشته‌ای؛ مطالعۀ موردی چهار مقاله از حوزه‌های مرتبط

Introduction: Music has specific theoretical concepts, analytical systems, and scientific vocabulary in its specialized topics, but at the same time it is also a social phenomenon that in everyday life is heard in various genres and people talk about it. This duality sometimes produces a kind of conceptual fluidity, and the issue becomes challenging when research from different fields of humanities, such as psychology and sociology, uses music as a subject or analytical variable. In such research, it is expected that this art would be analyzed on the basis of a specialized and methodical understanding, on a par with other fields, but sometimes it remains merely at the level of lived experience or the use of everyday language, challenging the content of the research; The conceptual fluidity in everyday language does not mean fluidity in the scientific research; rather, as has been emphasized in the systematic understanding of music, musical elements require accurate definition and explanation so that they can be properly incorporated into the research design.
Research Questions: The central question of this study is how the lack of specialized musicological knowledge in some interdisciplinary studies could lead to reductionism and unjustified fluidity in the meaning and concept of music? The importance of this question lies in the fact that music is a perceptual system with its own specific logic, and it simultaneously contains temporal structures, production methods, performance patterns, reception mechanisms, and ultimately interpretive features. Therefore, any entry of music into various fields of the humanities and interdisciplinary research requires a minimum of specialized knowledge of these internal dimensions.
Research Hypothesis: 1. The distinction between everyday language and scientific language; in the former, music is tied to lived experience, emotions, and cultural relationships, and in Cook’s terms, it can be applied as a “semantic label” to a wide range of experiences, without its internal dimensions being specified (Cook, 2000). In contrast, scientific language requires the clear definition of concepts; Nattiez emphasizes that a distinction must be made between the descriptive language of the listener and the analytical language of the researcher (Nattiez, 1990). 2. his three-level model, by distinguishing the poetic or production actions, internal or sound organization, and aesthetic or interpretation levels, shows that many interdisciplinary studies eliminate the “internal level” (Ibid). 3. Bader’s systematic understanding of music considers it as a network of relationships at three levels: perceptual, structural, and cultural and warns that without a precise definition of perceptual and structural levels, music becomes conceptually indeterminate (Bader, 2018). 4. Music as a cultural-historical phenomenon also emphasizes the diversity of functions in cultures, the necessity of determining the context of research, and the necessity of combining the two aesthetic and identity dimensions for the validity of the analysis (Steinberg, 2004; Garcia-Benito, 2025).
Research Literature: In Persian literature on music studies, although there is no research that directly targets the topic, the need to revise common categories of Iranian music shows that ignoring conceptual boundaries and aesthetic dimensions can lead to an inaccurate identity of the musical genres. In the foreign literature, frameworks have been proposed to avoid “fluidity of the concept of music”: some approaches pay attention simultaneously to the level of production, internal dimensions, and reception of music, and show that the elimination of the "internal level" in research linked to psychology and social sciences leads the study towards one-sided interpretations; On the other hand, studies related to cultural diversity explain that music is a cultural-historical phenomenon with variable meanings in different contexts, but this form of social fluidity should be distinguished from conceptual fixation at the research level. Studies of the cultural history of music also emphasize the necessity of a balance between the two aesthetic and structural contexts. In sum, research that systematically examines how interdisciplinary studies deal with the concept of music is rare; a gap that the present research seeks to address.
Research Method: This research is organized with a qualitative approach and based on discourse analysis and conceptual comparison. The study proceeds in three main steps: In the first one, the distinction between the everyday and scientific use of the word music is explained, citing theoretical opinions especially by Nattiez. In the second step, four scientific articles in the fields of “Cultural History and Politics”, “Psychology and Criminology”, “Theory of Text and Transtextuality”, and “Historical Musicology of Iran” have been purposefully selected to examine how they conceptualize music. Finally, by analyzing these examples, the extent of their reliance on specialized knowledge of music and the way in which concepts are transferred from non-musical fields to the field of music are examined in order to determine whether music is considered as a systematic sound structure or merely functions as a fluid and discourse-dependent concept.
Research Results: The analysis of the selected articles shows that the lack of accurate understanding of the nature and internal logic of music causes this art to become a fluid concept dependent on the entirety of the text; in such a way that, depending on the context, music is reduced to a political tool, psychological stimulus, literary text or cultural thing. The fundamental finding of the research indicates that the common features of these deviations are the fading or elimination of the “internal level” or the sound structure, and the dominance of everyday language over scientific one. This fluidity, which results from the shift between different definitional levels from ideological sign to lived experience, distorts the validity of the articles’ findings. Therefore, specialized musicological knowledge needs to be given greater weight in interdisciplinary studies in order to provide a more definite path for the scientific advancement of various aspects of music in the future.