The Sound of Value: A Relational History of Music: 1 The Emergence of Music: The Sound of Value

Before there was music as we now construe it, there was the rhythmic pulse of the social field. Early humans were not observers of one another, standing apart to orchestrate sound; they were embedded participants in collective temporality. Breath, step, heartbeat, and vocalisation wove together into the first ensembles of being, shaping the flow of life itself. Music, in this primordial sense, was not a semiotic system; it was a social system — a dynamic, temporal choreography of value exchange.

In Hallidayan terms, music belongs to the social plane of complex systems. Its domain is not the construal of meaning, but the alignment and modulation of affective and relational states. Drawing on Edelman’s concept of value systems, we can understand music as affective scaffolding: it organises the group’s attention, synchronises movement, and phases collective arousal. Its power lies in temporal attunement, not representation. A drumbeat, a chant, or a coordinated hum does not mean joy or fear in the semiotic sense; it orchestrates the group’s readiness and orientation, regulating social cohesion through the exchange of value.

The emergence of music was made possible by the evolution of entrainable temporality. Early hominins were capable of sustaining rhythmic patterns across bodies and time, creating temporal fields in which coordination could unfold. Music amplified the potential of collective life: individuals could align beyond immediate perception, synchronising not only action but expectation, anticipation, and affective state. In effect, music served as a pre-linguistic medium of social calibration, laying the groundwork for the later semiotic elaborations of language, art, and ritual.

It is crucial to emphasise that music itself remained non-semiotic. Unlike language, it did not construe referential meaning; it did not encode or symbolise. Its significance lay in its capacity to modulate relational intensity. Rhythmic pulses shaped the contours of cooperation, melodic contours coordinated attention, and harmonic interplay reinforced the interdependence of social actors. Through these mechanisms, music actualised the value system of the collective, making perceptible and manipulable what had hitherto been distributed, unarticulated relational potential.

Music’s early forms — drumming, clapping, humming, chant — were participatory, emergent, and iterative. Each performance was unique, co-constituted by the participants, and inseparable from the embodied context in which it occurred. There was no symbolic standing-for; there was only effect, resonance, and alignment. Through this pre-semiotic practice, groups could phase their attention and affective states, sustaining collective engagement over time and across space.

In sum, the genesis of music is inseparable from the evolution of social value systems. Music made possible the temporal coordination of the collective, providing the scaffolding upon which later symbolic capacities could emerge. It is not merely a precursor to art or language; it is a foundational social technology, a rhythmic architecture of relational life. In its very enactment, music demonstrates that the social stratum is primary, value is operational, and affective synchrony is the first medium of collective worlding.