Our earlier claim—that music is not, in itself, a semiotic system but a system of value—was never intended as a provocation. It was a clarification. Music does not mean; it organises. It coordinates bodies, modulates expectation, distributes affect, and stabilises or destabilises collective relation. If meaning appears in music, it does so not as an intrinsic property, but through the coupling of music with semiotic systems: language, notation, theory.
This distinction, drawn from Halliday’s separation of meaning and value, has since been extended beyond music to domains such as religion, science, ideology, and nationalism. In each case, what emerges is not simply the coexistence of value and meaning, but their systematic coupling—and crucially, their coupling in different ways.
This shift—from identifying systems to analysing their relations—marks the beginning of a more general inquiry. The question is no longer:
Is this system one of meaning or value?
but rather:
What kind of relation is enacted when systems of value and systems of meaning couple?
1. Against Flattening: The Problem of “Multimodality”
Contemporary accounts often treat combinations such as music and lyrics, ritual and doctrine, or image and text under the broad category of “multimodality.” While descriptively useful, this framing is theoretically blunt. It presupposes that all such combinations are instances of the same general phenomenon: the layering or integration of multiple semiotic modes.
But this is precisely what must be resisted.
To treat music and lyrics as simply “two modes of meaning” is to erase the distinction between value and meaning. It is to assume, in advance, that all organised phenomena are semiotic—that all coordination is already symbolic. Under such a view, the specificity of music as a value system disappears, and with it the possibility of understanding how meaning emerges in relation to it.
What is required instead is a framework that can distinguish not only between systems, but between the relations that hold between them.
2. Coupling as Relational Cut
Coupling is not a fusion, nor a layering, nor an interaction in any loose sense. It is a relational cut: a specific configuration in which two distinct systems—one of value, one of meaning—are brought into relation such that a new form of organisation is actualised.
This formulation carries several implications:
The systems remain ontologically distinct. Music does not become language; language does not become music.
The coupling is not external to the systems, but a reconfiguration of their potential—a shift in how each may be actualised.
What is produced is not a hybrid system, but a structured relation between systems, with its own constraints and affordances.
To speak of coupling, then, is to speak of a mode of co-actualisation—a way in which distinct systems are jointly brought into instance.
3. The Unit of Coupling
If coupling is to function as an analytic category rather than a metaphor, its unit must be specified.
In a value system such as music, the instance is not a “message” but an event of coordination: a temporal organisation of relation. In a semiotic system such as language, the instance is a text: a construal of meaning through symbolic selection.
When these systems couple, the resulting instance is neither reducible to one nor the other. It is not:
a text with musical accompaniment, nor
a musical event with attached meaning.
Rather, it is a coupled instance: a single event in which:
value is actualised as coordination, and
meaning is actualised as construal,
under conditions of mutual constraint.
This is the minimal unit of analysis for the present inquiry.
4. Variation in Coupling
Once coupling is understood as a structured relation, it becomes possible to ask whether all such relations are of the same kind.
The answer, emerging from comparative analysis, is no.
Consider the difference—initially intuitive, but theoretically decisive—between:
a song, in which music and lyrics co-occur, and
a religious ritual, in which symbolic structures organise embodied practice.
Both involve value and meaning. Both involve coordination and construal. But the relation between them differs.
In song:
music and language are co-present, neither wholly subordinating the other
the systems constrain each other without collapsing into a single hierarchy
In religion (as one example among others):
symbolic systems often organise and regulate value systems
coordination is subordinated to doctrinal or ideological structures
To treat these as instances of the same phenomenon is to miss the essential point:
Coupling itself varies.
It is not a single mechanism, but a field of possible relations.
5. Toward a Typology
The task, then, is to develop a typology of coupling relations between value and meaning systems. Such a typology must be:
Relational, not taxonomic: concerned with how systems are configured, not what they are in isolation
Perspectival, recognising that “system” and “instance” are themselves matters of construal
Non-reductive, preserving the distinction between value and meaning at every stage
The aim is not to classify domains (music, religion, science), but to identify the kinds of coupling they instantiate.
6. Consequences
This shift has immediate consequences for how we understand music and its extensions:
Music does not “gain meaning” when lyrics are added; rather, a specific type of coupling is established
Notation does not “represent” music; it reconstitutes it under a semiotic construal
Music theory does not “describe” music; it operates within a secondary coupling, relating semiotic systems to other semiotic systems derived from value
More broadly, it reframes the relation between value and meaning across domains. Meaning is not the default condition of organised systems. It is a specialised regime that emerges under particular forms of coupling.
7. The Argument Ahead
The chapters that follow will develop this framework through a series of analyses:
Song, as a case of synchronous co-actualisation
Notation, as a reconstitution of value under semiotic construal
Theory, as second-order coupling
Religion and related domains, as instances of asymmetrical or dominant coupling
Each will be treated not as an object of study, but as an instantiation of a relational type.
The wager is simple, but not trivial:
that by understanding how value and meaning couple, we can begin to map the conditions under which meaning itself becomes possible—and the conditions under which it does not.
In this sense, the present inquiry does not extend the earlier claim about music. It radicalises it.
Music was never the endpoint. It was the entry point.
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