Ian Crisp replies to me: >My wife .. assures me that one of the fundamental tenets of that >profession is that any sound may and probably will provoke an >emotional response in very young children, the mentally ill, the >"handicapped" and the emotionally vulnerable. The rest of us >may have learnt to repress those innocent responses, but that >doesn't mean that they are not still there under the surface There is no question in my mind but that this is the case. Perhaps we are quibbling over your use of "communication" for what I will readily agre is the evocation of some response. Where I have a problem is that the purpose of comunication seems to me to be the *sharing* of a *specific* message, not the evocation of a generally similar or qualitatively/quantitatively comparable response. >Where did "require" come into it? I assumed that a list of three items constituting a definition implied that all three items were "required". >What C transmits to P (and of course they might be the same >person) is an incomplete set of instructions for making sounds. Incomplete in some sense perhaps, but complete in all the important respects. The score is the abstraction of all performances -- it specifies that which is common to all "valid" performances of the work. It is "incomplete" in that while it specifies all that must (should?) be present in a performance, it says little (except by convention) about what the performer may (or may not) add. len.