This dissertation explores linguistic and narrative structures in the sound of Robert Ashley, Michel Chion, Trevor Wishart, and my own art practice. It situates these practices in the broader context of 20th century sound art, and further makes a case for the affordances that cognitive and neuroscientific approaches to mind (particularly those found in the Catastrophe Theory of Rene Thom and Wolfgang Wildgen) hold for describing and organizing artworks more generally.