After reading Neil Cohn’s essay entitled “Visual Lexicon” (he’s studying visual language via comics and speaking in Toronto this Thursday), I had basically no brain cells left to really reflect critically on his research, although I tend to have a soft spot for work that tries to bring cognition into the realm of the creative arts. In terms of my musical interests, Cohn brings up the point that music appears at first to have all the qualities of a Natural Language (instead of a lower case language) with the key exception that it does not convey concepts. The music advocate in me wants to object (what can’t music accomplish?!), but upon reflection, the only viable angle I really have is that while music does not convey concepts, we do have concepts about music in order for us to talk about it. So, what can I talk about?