There is a stubborn intuition — shared by scholars, critics, and casual listeners alike — that music must be meaningful.
Not merely powerful, moving, or socially effective, but meaningful in something like the way language is meaningful. When pressed, this intuition produces familiar manoeuvres: music is said to express emotion, represent experience, narrate without words, or operate as a kind of proto‑language whose meanings are ineffable but nonetheless real.
Instrumental music, in particular, is treated as a problem case — a semiotic system that somehow forgot to include signs.
In this post, we want to argue that this entire framing is mistaken.
Not because music is trivial, pre‑cultural, or merely physiological — but because it operates in a different ontological register altogether. Music does not construe meaning. It does something both simpler and more profound: it modulates readiness.
The Limits of the Semiotic Frame
Semiotic systems work by construal. They cut experience into phenomena that can be recognised, differentiated, and taken up as meaning. Language is the paradigmatic case: it does not merely reflect experience, but actively constitutes it as experience‑that‑can‑be‑meant.
Music resists this mechanism.
Despite centuries of analysis, no stable inventory of musical meanings has ever survived scrutiny. Attempts to treat musical elements as signs — motifs as symbols, harmonies as affects, forms as narratives — inevitably collapse into metaphor, projection, or post‑hoc rationalisation. What is offered as meaning turns out to be commentary layered over the musical event, not something construed by it.
Instrumental music exposes this failure most clearly. Without lyrics, reference, or propositional content, it continues to exert immense social and bodily force — synchronising groups, sustaining rituals, intensifying labour, marking grief, enabling trance — while stubbornly refusing paraphrase.
This should already give us pause. A system that does real social work without construing meaning is not a defective semiotic system. It is a different kind of system.
From Meaning to Value
One way of responding to this impasse has been to shift attention from meaning to value.
Music plainly activates biological value: arousal, anticipation, tension, release, entrainment. These are not meanings; they are patterns of regulation within living systems. Crucially, music does not merely stimulate these patterns individually — it coordinates them socially. Bodies align in time. Thresholds synchronise. Collective orientation emerges.
For some time, we have argued that this is music’s real domain: the activation of biological value into social value, without passing through the semiotic.
But this formulation, while correct, left an important question under‑articulated: what exactly is being shaped or organised when music does its work? If not meaning, and not merely raw affect, then what?
Readiness as Structured Potential
The missing concept is readiness.
Readiness names a state of structured potential for coordination. It is not a feeling, not an intention, and not a meaning. It is a systemic condition: a configuration of thresholds, expectations, and temporal sensitivities that makes certain actions, alignments, or transitions more likely than others.
Readiness is:
pre‑semiotic (it does not construe phenomena),
relational (it exists between systems, not inside isolated subjects), and
scalable (it operates at the level of bodies, groups, and assemblages).
Music works by modulating readiness over time.
Rhythm tunes anticipatory thresholds. Density and timbre adjust tolerance and pressure. Repetition stabilises expectation; variation destabilises it. Crescendos do not mean intensification — they produce conditions in which intensification becomes possible, even inevitable.
Nothing is signified. Something is prepared.
Why Instrumental Music Matters
Instrumental music is not an impoverished case. It is the clearest case.
Because it lacks the semiotic scaffolding of language, it reveals with unusual clarity what music is actually doing. The listener is not decoding content but being progressively oriented within a shifting field of possibility. The social effect does not arise from shared interpretation, but from shared modulation of readiness.
This is why instrumental music can coordinate action among people who share no language, no culture, and no interpretive framework — and why its power persists even when its supposed “meanings” are contested or forgotten.
A Different Kind of Social Technology
Seen this way, music is neither a language nor an art that borrows from language. It is a non‑semiotic social technology: a way of shaping collective potential directly, without the mediation of symbols.
This does not make it primitive. On the contrary, it makes it conceptually revealing. Music shows us that social coherence, alignment, and transformation do not require meaning — only the skilful modulation of readiness.
In the posts that follow, we will develop this claim in more detail: examining how musical systems operate, why machine‑generated music makes these dynamics newly visible, and what all this tells us about the evolution of possibility itself.
For now, the key point is simple:
Music does not tell us what to think or feel.It prepares us — together — for what can happen next.
That, we will suggest, is its true power.
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