Emotion and meaning in the music of José Suñer-Oriola: approaches from the Neuroscience of Music

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between emotion and meaning in the music of José Suñer-Oriola from a perspective firmly rooted in the Neuroscience of Music. The main objective is to analyze how certain structural, temporal, and perceptual features of his compositional language foster the emergence of complex emotional experiences and non-propositional signification processes, understood as dynamic constructions between the sound stimulus and the listener's nervous system. The study draws on contemporary models of musical processing that integrate predictive coding, expectancy theory, embodiment, distributed neural networks, and musical memory mechanisms. From this perspective, musical emotion is not conceived as a subjective epiphenomenon, but rather as a multilevel process that articulates physiological, affective, cognitive, and temporal responses. The analysis proposes that Suñer-Oriola's music operates as a sonic environment of high informational density that stimulates the continuous reorganization of perceptual expectations, fostering emotional states characterized by ambiguity, prolonged tension, and emergent meaning. It is argued that these dynamics can be explained by the interaction between limbic, paralimbic, and cortical systems, as well as by the activation of sensorimotor simulation mechanisms and episodic memory. This work contributes to an interdisciplinary dialogue between musical analysis, aesthetics, and neuroscience, proposing an interpretive framework that situates aesthetic experience as an embodied and temporally extended neurocognitive phenomenon.