The Sound of Value: A Relational History of Music: 8 Music, Emotion, and Social Value: The Non-Semiotic Foundations Revisited

While notation, theory, and improvisation situate music within the semiotic plane, its deepest roots remain non-semiotic, affective, and social. Music in itself does not stand for meanings; it modulates attention, synchrony, and relational alignment, shaping the flow of social interaction and the circulation of value among participants. Edelman’s framework of value systems provides a lens for understanding this: music orchestrates the exchange of affective significance, coordinating collective experience without invoking symbolic reference.

Rhythmic entrainment exemplifies this principle. Heartbeats, footsteps, and bodily gestures resonate within groups, creating temporal alignment and facilitating mutual orientation. Melodic contours, dynamic shifts, and harmonic tension guide affective flow, establishing peaks, resolutions, and shared moments of intensity. These processes mediate social cohesion, influence decision-making, and scaffold coordinated action, even in the absence of explicit denotation or semiotic content.

Music’s power lies in its capacity to amplify relational and temporal dynamics. Unlike language, which symbolises and abstracts experience, music operates directly within the field of participation, shaping interaction through temporally extended patterns of alignment and divergence. Its efficacy emerges not from referentiality but from the sensitive modulation of social and affective currents — a technology of relational attunement that humans have refined across cultures and epochs.

The semiotic innovations of notation and theory enhance but do not supplant this foundation. They allow reflection, recombination, and cross-temporal communication, yet the social and affective substrate remains indispensable. Even the most abstractly structured compositions — polyphonic fugues, complex jazz improvisations, or digitally mediated soundscapes — are experienced and sustained within networks of social attention, bodily coordination, and affective resonance.

Viewed relationally, music exemplifies a dual ontology:

1. Non-semiotic sociality — the modulation of attention, affect, and value exchange through embodied and temporal patterns;

2. Semiotic extension — the symbolic representation, codification, and manipulation of musical patterns via notation and theory.

This duality explains music’s enduring significance. It anchors human interaction, amplifies affective and attentional flow, and scaffolds collective life, while simultaneously extending human capacities for abstraction, experimentation, and temporal projection. Music is thus both practice and symbol, social technology and laboratory of relational potential.

In sum, the relational history of music shows how affective, social, and symbolic layers co-emerge, interact, and transform one another. Music actualises the potential for coordinated social experience, provides a semiotic canvas for reflective creativity, and amplifies the human capacity to modulate, explore, and reconfigure relational worlds. It demonstrates that human culture is not merely a matter of representation, but of participation, alignment, and the ongoing negotiation of value — the very processes that underpin both social cohesion and the emergence of symbolic thought.