Iain Morley, from the School of Anthropology, presented a wide-ranging and stimulating account of gesture, with a particular emphasis on human evolution, and the relationship between gesture and music. Characterizing gesture as deliberate action(s), with communicative intent, and emotional motivation, he remarked on the overlap between speech, music and gesture, the massive significant resources that are devoted to gesture, and the value of the semiotic distinctions between indexicality, iconicity and symbolic functions in the analysis and interpretation of gesture. Wide-ranging discussion pursued a variety of topics, including the (questionably) gestural nature of notations (musical and painterly); gestures and tools; the relationship between gesture as expressive of, and as constitutive of, cognition and emotion; and the underlying rhythmicity of gesture.
