ABSTRACT. Tarasti states that music has been understood as a signifying practice from baroque to Viennese classicism through to romanticism and modernism. Palmer holds that musicians can replicate their expressive patterns of timing and dynamics for a given musical piece with high precision. Hargreaves et al. suggests that music can be used increasingly as a means by which we formulate and express our individual identities. Schachter asserts that there is a gulf between musicians who find notes and the sounds they represent worthy objects of close study, and those who do not. Kivy argues that music alone is a quasi-syntactic structure of musical properties (some of which are describable in phenomenological terms).