[1] "Topics", or various musical conventions (such as horn calls, dance forms, and styles), have been treated suggestively by Agawu, among others.
The notion of gesture is beginning to play a large role in musico-semiotic enquiry.
There are strong arguments that music inhabits a semiological realm which, on both ontogenetic and phylogenetic levels, has developmental priority over verbal language.
[non sequitur][citation needed][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]Writers on music semiology include Kofi Agawu (on topical theory, Schenkerian analysis), Robert S. Hatten (on topic, gesture), Raymond Monelle (on topic, musical meaning), Jean-Jacques Nattiez (on introversive taxonomic analysis and ethnomusicological applications), Anthony Newcomb (on narrativity), Thomas Turino (applying the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce), and Eero Tarasti (generally considered the founder of musical semiotics).
Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff[14] analyze how music is structured like a language with its own semiotics and syntax.