The Sound of Value: A Relational History of Music: 5 Notation and Theory: Music Enters the Semiotic Plane

The innovations of rhythm, melody, and synchrony establish music as a robust social technology, coordinating attention, affect, and value exchange across groups. Yet these capacities remained non-semiotic: they did not stand for meanings in Hallidayan terms. Music enters the semiotic plane when humans develop systems of notation, theory, and codification, allowing sound to be abstracted, represented, and manipulated independently of immediate performance.

Notation transforms music from ephemeral event to objectifiable pattern. Notes on a page, tablature, or symbolic schemata create a content plane within the musical system, separable from the expressive plane of sound and gesture. Just as the stratification of language into lexicogrammar and semantics enabled metaphor — meanings standing for meanings — notation allows musical forms to stand for sound events, to be reproduced, analysed, and communicated beyond the constraints of the here-and-now.

Theory extends this abstraction. Scales, intervals, and harmonic principles provide a meta-structure that constrains and guides practice. Musicians can now manipulate patterns symbolically, anticipating relationships among sounds, formalising rules, and exploring possibilities that were previously inaccessible in purely performance-based contexts. Music acquires a reflexive dimension: composers and theorists can treat melody, rhythm, and harmony as objects of thought, capable of recombination, representation, and discourse.

Crucially, this semiotic turn does not dissolve music’s social grounding. Even when encoded or theorised, music retains its temporal and affective scaffolding. Notation and theory operate upon patterns originally shaped for social coordination and value exchange; they amplify, extend, and make reproducible the relational alignments first realised through rhythm and melody. Semiotic practice is thus layered upon the non-semiotic foundation, preserving the interplay of social and affective dynamics even as abstraction increases.

The transition to semiotic music enables complexity, innovation, and cross-temporal dialogue. Works can be shared across generations, recombined in novel ways, and transmitted independently of embodied performance. This is the folding back of practice into reflection, a hallmark of human symbolic capability: music can now represent, encode, and manipulate its own relational structures, engaging the intellect and imagination alongside the body and affect.

Viewed relationally, the semioticisation of music illustrates a co-emergence of social and symbolic capacities. Social technologies — rhythm, melody, synchrony — form the substrate; symbolic systems — notation, theory, codification — enable abstraction, recombination, and reflexivity. Music becomes a domain in which human potential for relational, temporal, and symbolic extension is amplified, allowing both participation and contemplation, enactment and representation.

In sum, notation and theory mark music’s entry into the semiotic plane, not by inventing affect or social coordination anew, but by abstracting, preserving, and extending the relational capacities honed through collective practice. Music now straddles two ontologies: the non-semiotic social field, in which value, affect, and mutuality circulate, and the semiotic field, in which patterns of sound are represented, analysed, and manipulated. This duality is the hallmark of music’s power: it is at once social technology, aesthetic practice, and symbolic system, making possible worlds of participation and worlds of thought in one temporal flow.