Up to this point, we have argued that music is not a semiotic system, that its social power lies in the activation of biological value, and that this activation is best understood in terms of readiness: a relational, temporal condition of structured potential for coordination.
In this post, we want to submit that account to a decisive stress test.
What happens when music is produced by systems that cannot feel, intend, express, or mean?
If the prevailing intuitions about music are right — if music is fundamentally expressive, communicative, or semiotic — then machine‑generated music should appear hollow, inert, or at best derivative. If, however, music operates primarily by modulating readiness, then machines should be able to do this work perfectly well.
What we find, increasingly, is the latter.
The Expressive Intuition
Most informal theories of music rely, explicitly or implicitly, on an expressive model. Music is assumed to originate in an inner state — emotion, intention, experience — which is then externalised in sound and taken up by a listener who recognises or resonates with it.
This model survives largely because it is difficult to falsify in human contexts. We are predisposed to attribute intention, feeling, and meaning to other humans, even when the evidence is thin. As long as a human performer is involved, expression can always be presumed.
Machines disrupt this comfort.
What Machines Lack — and Why That Matters
Machines do not possess biological regulation, affective states, or social intentions. They do not care whether a passage resolves, intensifies, or collapses. They do not experience anticipation or release.
Yet machine‑generated music can still:
entrain bodies,
sustain attention,
generate tension and release,
coordinate movement and collective timing.
Nothing expressive has been added — but nothing essential is missing.
This is not because machines secretly feel, nor because listeners project meaning particularly well. It is because expression was never doing the causal work.
Readiness Laid Bare
When music is generated by machines, the expressive story falls away, and what remains becomes visible.
Patterns of rhythm, density, variation, and recurrence operate directly on readiness. Thresholds are stretched, saturated, or reset. Anticipatory structures are established and perturbed. Systems are biased toward certain transitions rather than others.
Crucially, none of this depends on the origin of the sound.
A kick drum produced by a human, a synthesiser, or an algorithm makes the same demand on timing. A sudden silence creates the same suspension. A gradual accumulation of density produces the same pressure.
The machine does not express readiness. It produces conditions under which readiness is modulated.
Dark Machines and the Collapse of Hermeneutics
The effect is especially pronounced in darker, percussion‑dominant, machine‑forward music.
Here, the last refuges of musical hermeneutics disappear. There is little melody to sentimentalise, no performer’s intention to recover, no narrative arc to reconstruct. What remains are pulses, pressures, textures, and recursive patterns.
Listeners do not ask what such music means. They register whether it holds, strains, overwhelms, or releases. They move, brace, endure, or synchronise.
This is not a failure of interpretation. It is a revelation of what music has been doing all along.
Machines as Ontological Instruments
Seen in this light, machine‑generated music is not a lesser form of music. It is an ontological instrument.
By removing expression, intention, and biography from the frame, machines allow us to observe music’s operative layer directly. They make visible the modulation of readiness that human contexts habitually obscure with stories about meaning.
This does not devalue human musicianship. It clarifies it. Human performers are not valuable because they express inner states, but because they are exquisitely sensitive operators of readiness — attuned to timing, density, and collective thresholds.
What This Forces Us to Admit
Machine music confronts us with an uncomfortable conclusion:
Music does not need meaning in order to work.
It needs only the capacity to shape temporal relations and coordinate readiness across systems. Machines can do this. Humans have always done this. The difference is not ontological, but cultural.
In the next post, we will widen the frame beyond music, asking what other social practices operate by modulating readiness rather than construing meaning — and what this implies for how we understand social order, ritual, and power.
For now, the lesson is stark:
When expression disappears, music does not collapse.It becomes intelligible.
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