In the previous post, we argued that music does not operate as a semiotic system. It does not construe meaning, represent experience, or communicate propositions. Instead, it modulates readiness: structured potential for coordination over time.
In this post, we want to slow down and examine the substrate on which this modulation operates.
If music is not meaningful, but is nonetheless socially powerful, then what exactly is it activating? The answer, we will argue, lies in biological value — and in the way music transforms biological value into social coordination without ever passing through meaning.
What Biological Value Is (and Is Not)
Biological value refers to the regulatory dimensions of living systems: arousal, inhibition, anticipation, effort, recovery, tension, release. These are not emotions in the narrative sense, and they are certainly not meanings. They are patterns of viability management — ways organisms keep themselves within workable bounds while acting in the world.
Crucially, biological value is:
graded, not categorical;
temporal, not instantaneous;
non-representational, not about something else.
A racing heart, a held breath, a readiness to move — none of these mean anything. They prepare the organism for possible action.
Music couples directly to this layer.
Entrainment, Anticipation, and Thresholds
The most obvious mechanism by which music activates biological value is entrainment. Rhythmic regularities align internal oscillations — breathing, movement, attention — with external temporal patterns. But entrainment is only the entry point.
More significant is what music does to anticipatory thresholds.
Repetition establishes expectation. Variation perturbs it. Delay stretches tolerance. Sudden change collapses it. Over time, listeners are not merely experiencing sounds; they are being tuned to when something should happen, how much deviation can be sustained, and what kind of transition is imminent.
These are not interpretations. They are adjustments of readiness.
Importantly, this tuning occurs even when the listener has no cultural knowledge of the musical system in question. The body does not need to know what a cadence “means” in order to register the pressure it resolves.
From Individual Regulation to Social Alignment
Biological value becomes socially significant when it is shared in time.
Music does not simply stimulate multiple individuals in parallel. It synchronises their regulatory dynamics. Bodies move together. Attention peaks together. Release arrives together. The result is not shared meaning, but shared orientation.
This is why music is so deeply implicated in ritual, labour, dance, mourning, protest, and warfare. In each case, what matters is not agreement about interpretation, but alignment of thresholds: when to begin, when to intensify, when to stop.
Social value emerges here not as symbolism, but as coordination capacity.
Why Meaning Gets in the Way
Attempts to treat music as meaningful often obscure this mechanism.
Once musical effects are redescribed as emotions to be expressed or messages to be conveyed, attention shifts away from the real work music is doing: regulating collective readiness. Meaning-talk invites interpretation, disagreement, and reflection — all of which are orthogonal to the immediate synchronising function of music.
This is not to deny that people talk about music meaningfully. Commentary, metaphor, and narrative proliferate around musical practices. But these are secondary constructions, layered onto an event whose primary efficacy lies elsewhere.
Confusing these layers leads to a familiar error: mistaking the social discourse about music for the social mechanism of music.
Value Without Semiosis
At this point, it should be clear why music presents such a challenge to meaning-centred theories of culture.
Here is a domain that:
shapes behaviour and attention,
sustains collective practices,
and transforms social dynamics,
all without construing meaning.
Music demonstrates that value can be activated, shared, and stabilised socially without symbols. It does not tell participants what to think or believe. It prepares them — biologically and collectively — to act together.
In the next post, we will return explicitly to the concept of readiness, developing it as the formal bridge between biological value and social coordination, and showing why music is one of the clearest technologies for its modulation.
For now, the conclusion is straightforward:
Music does not work by making sense.It works by making timing, pressure, and possibility align.
Meaning can wait. Coordination cannot.
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