 According to Langer, musical symbols are presentational symbols of a particular sort. The commonplace descriptions of music in emotional terms (“sad”, “happy”, “melancholy”, etc.) are due to an isomorphic relation between the dynamic form of music and that of feelings. For instance, the musical expression of anxiety is achieved by prolonged, unresolved tensions, and this is the form of anxiety as we experience it. Because music matches the form of feelings much more closely than language may even aspire to do, musical symbols cannot be replaced by linguistic ones without loss in precision—this is Langer’s version of the ineffability thesis (see  §1.1).