A museme is the smallest unit of significance or meaning in any piece of music. People frequently compare it to a morpheme, which is a linguistic term for a group of sounds that have meaning. All music is made up of complex strings and stacks of musemes, at least in theory.
Charles Seegar is generally credited with coining the term “museme.” He combined the beginning of “music” with the end of “morpheme” in an attempt to define the concept of the smallest musical unit of meaning. Bill Brooks later proposed the museme string, or museme sequence. He also suggested the museme stack, which is simply the occurrence of multiple musemes at the same time. This takes into account the fact that music frequently contains multiple individual parts that complement and interact with one another.
Despite the fact that the musical museme has been compared to the language morpheme, as Philip Tagg points out, defining a museme in this way creates a major problem: To give meaning to anything, culture is required. Different people can interpret the same minimal musical unit to mean different things in this context. In fact, this is the foundation of musical interpretation, and it is what distinguishes the same composition performed by two different players or singers. This means that even when a museme is identifiable, it is impossible to define exactly what it means.
Because the meaning of a museme is ambiguous, musicologists must be flexible in defining what constitutes an individual meaningful musical unit. Individual beats often correspond to steps that a dancer is supposed to take, so musemes can be seen as individual beats by a dancer. A museme for a jazz musician could be a specific set of chords that he must improvise around.
All music is supposed to engage people’s artistic senses in a broad sense. It is also supposed to satisfy human beings’ emotional and spiritual needs to some extent. Musicologists are interested in musemes because the way musemes are arranged and work together determines whether music fulfills these roles, despite the difficulty of explaining the meaning behind individual musemes found in a piece of music. Musicologists examine musemes in search of a “code” that will reveal why the music is so powerful or stirring, much like linguists seek to understand how individual sounds contribute to sophisticated verbal communication.