Music is often assumed to be inherently meaningful. We hear a rhythm, a melody, a harmony, and the impulse is to attach sense, story, or significance. Relational ontology, however, insists on a sharper cut: music is not meaning; it is value. Meaning emerges only through attention, duration, and ethical presence.
Music as Value
Music operates, first and foremost, as a non-symbolic coordination system. It aligns bodies, modulates affect, structures attention, and orchestrates social or environmental dynamics — all without carrying intrinsic semiotic meaning. A bass pulse may synchronise dancers; a drone may guide breathing; a rhythmic pattern may organise collective movement. These are fields of value, not meaning. The system functions, coordinates, and affects, yet it does not itself convey relational semiotic content.
Liora’s experience on the path illustrates this principle: the rhythm of her steps, the sway of leaves, the whisper of wind — all exert influence, guide attention, and modulate engagement. They are value in motion. Meaning, however, is something she co-actualises through sustained attention and presence.
Listening as Meaningful Engagement
Meaning arises in the act of listening as ethical actualisation. It is not given by the notes, the silence, or the structure of a composition, but by the attention sustained in inhabiting it.
Consider Cage’s 4’33”: the ambient sounds — coughs, shuffles, distant traffic — become the composition itself. Meaning emerges only as the listener notices, attends, and inhabits these sounds. In this silence, the world itself is the instrument, and the listener’s presence is the creative act.
Similarly, Beckett’s pauses in Waiting for Godot demand endurance. Characters sit, wait, and gesture minimally; the dramatic “nothing” is full of relational potential. Meaning emerges not from action, but from sustained attention to absence.
In minimalist repetition — a motif in Reich or Glass — small variations over time create perceptible patterns. These patterns are not meaningful until the listener integrates them, noticing shifts, overlaps, and temporal contours. The repetition itself is a field of value; attention actualises the semiotic content.
Liora’s horizon mirrors this principle. The journey unfolds in rhythms of her footsteps, the wind’s hum, the subtle movements of the path — all orchestrating attention without dictating meaning. This is value in its most relational form, waiting for inhabitation to become meaningful.
The Ethical Act of Listening
Listening is not passive. It is a temporal, relational, and ethical act. Waiting for a note to resolve, holding attention to a silence, noticing imperceptible shifts — these are the labour through which semiotic actualisation occurs. Duration, rhythm, and constraint converge to make music meaningful not by its inherent structure, but by the attention it evokes and sustains.
Where the Relational Time series examined constraint, rhythm, duration, and event, this post foregrounds the semiotic act of listening. Music itself remains a field of value; meaning is relational, ethical, and temporally realised. Liora, Beckett, Cage — all demonstrate that meaning is co-actualised, not intrinsic. Music carries potential; listening actualises it.
Punchline:
“Music carries value; listening carries meaning. Semiotic actualisation is a temporal, relational, and ethical act.”
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