A sound is a physical event.
Pressure waves move through air. The ear registers variations in pressure. Neural systems respond. Nothing in this description requires value, significance or meaning.
And yet, for a living organism, a sound is almost never merely a physical event.
A crack behind us can make us turn.
A familiar voice can make us relax.
A sudden change in volume can make us alert.
A repeated rhythm can make us move.
A lullaby can settle a child.
A piece of music can make us feel that something has happened even when nothing in the external world has changed.
Somehow, the physical event has acquired value.
The interesting question is not yet what does the sound mean?
It is:
Why does this sound matter?
That question takes us beneath semiotics, into the organisation of living systems.
A world of differences
An organism does not encounter the world as an inventory of neutral physical properties.
There are differences everywhere, but not all differences matter equally.
A slight variation in air pressure may be physically real but biologically irrelevant. Another variation may indicate danger. Another may signal food, a mate, a parent, a competitor, or the approach of another member of the social group.
The difference between these cases is not located simply in the sound itself.
It lies in the relation between the sound and the organisation of the organism.
This is the first important point about value:
Value is relational.
A sound does not possess biological value in isolation. Its value arises from what it does within a system capable of responding to it.
The same sound can matter differently to different organisms. The same organism can respond differently to the same sound at different times. Context changes value because the organism's possibilities have changed.
A sound that matters when we are alert may not matter when we are asleep.
A familiar sound may be comforting in one situation and alarming in another.
Value is therefore not an additional property mysteriously attached to matter.
It is a property of organised relations.
Edelman and the biological roots of value
This is where Edelman's notion of biological value becomes particularly useful.
Living systems are not passive receivers of information. Their organisation has been shaped through processes of selection in which some consequences have mattered more than others. What supports continued organisation is not equivalent to what threatens it. The organism therefore operates within a world already differentiated by value.
We might call this the world of the organism rather than the world described by physics.
Physics tells us that there are variations in pressure.
The organism encounters something that matters.
The distinction is not between two different worlds. It is between two different descriptions of the same event according to the organisation through which it is encountered.
A sound becomes biologically significant when it enters into the organism's economy of possible action.
That is why the notion of information, by itself, can be misleading.
A sound can carry enormous physical information while having no value whatsoever for an organism.
Conversely, a very simple sound can have enormous value.
The important question is not how much information the sound contains.
It is what difference the sound makes.
From information to value
Consider the simplest possible case.
A sudden loud noise occurs.
The organism orients toward it.
Before there is any identification of the source, there can already be a change in disposition: attention is redirected, muscles prepare for action, alternative responses are weighted differently.
The organism does not first construct a complete symbolic interpretation and then decide whether to react.
The response can precede interpretation.
This is why the distinction between signal and sign becomes useful.
The sound may function as a signal because it changes the organism's behaviour.
But it need not yet function as a sign.
There need be no proposition:
Something dangerous has occurred.
There can simply be:
Something has changed. Attend.
The latter is not a sentence.
It is an organisation of response.
This suggests that the history of significance begins considerably earlier than the history of meaning.
When organisms meet
The distinction becomes even more interesting when we move beyond the individual organism.
One organism can become a source of differences that matter to another.
The sound of a parent can alter the behaviour of an offspring. The call of one animal can alter the behaviour of others. A movement can recruit another movement. A chemical signal can change the activity of an entire colony.
Now value exists between organisms.
This is where our earlier use of Edelman in relation to eusocial insects becomes especially revealing.
Within an organism, adaptive value helps organise behaviour.
Between organisms, signals can organise behaviour relationally.
The result is not merely a collection of individual responses. Reciprocal responses can produce a new level of organisation: coordinated social activity.
The sound therefore does not merely affect an organism.
It can become part of a pattern of relations among organisms.
And that is already surprisingly close to music.
The social value of rhythm
Imagine two people walking together.
At first their steps are independent.
Then, almost imperceptibly, they begin to synchronise.
Neither person needs to formulate a symbolic instruction.
One person's movement changes the temporal possibilities available to the other. Each responds to the other's rhythm, and the interaction stabilises into a shared pattern.
Now introduce a beat.
The beat can make coordination easier.
Add several people, and the effect can become collective.
A pulse gives everyone a temporal reference against which their actions can be organised.
The beat need not represent coordination.
It can produce coordination.
This is a crucial distinction.
Music does not always tell us what to do.
Sometimes it makes doing something together easier.
That is a form of social value.
Mattering between organisms
We can therefore extend the distinction between intraorganism and interorganism value.
Within the organism:
A difference matters because it alters the organisation of possible responses.
Between organisms:
A difference matters because it alters the organisation of possible interactions.
In both cases, meaning is unnecessary.
This is perhaps the deepest reason why music can be socially powerful without being a semiotic system.
Music creates structured differences in time.
Those differences can alter the possibilities of action available to individuals.
And when individuals respond to those differences together, a collective pattern can emerge.
The music has acquired social value.
It matters because of what it enables the participants to do together.
Why rhythm is special
This may help explain why rhythm occupies such a peculiar place in human musical life.
Melody can be remembered.
Harmony can create expectation.
Timbre can evoke associations.
But rhythm directly concerns temporal organisation.
A rhythm establishes intervals.
Intervals establish expectation.
Expectation establishes possibilities.
Possibilities constrain action.
And coordinated action can produce collective organisation.
The rhythm therefore does not need to be translated into a symbolic code before it can become socially effective.
A marching rhythm does not first mean march and then cause marching.
The relation can run in the opposite direction.
The rhythm organises movement, and only afterwards might a culture attach a symbolic meaning to the activity.
This is an important reversal.
We are accustomed to thinking:
meaning → behaviour.
But sometimes the sequence is closer to:
rhythm → coordination → social practice → meaning.
Meaning can be the consequence of an already organised social activity rather than its prerequisite.
Significance without representation
Here we can return to the distinction between mattering and meaning.
Something matters when it changes the organisation of a system.
Something means when it participates in a semiotic relation.
The two can coincide, but they need not.
A sound may matter enormously without representing anything.
Indeed, some of the most powerful musical experiences seem to depend precisely upon this separation.
We may know exactly what a piece of music does to us while being unable to say what it is about.
It may create tension without representing danger.
It may produce tenderness without representing a tender object.
It may create exhilaration without representing anything exhilarating.
It may make us feel suspended, expectant, restless, peaceful or mournful without providing a proposition that tells us what those states signify.
This does not make the experience vague.
Quite the opposite.
The music can be extraordinarily precise in its organisation of experience while remaining extraordinarily indeterminate in symbolic reference.
Perhaps we have sometimes mistaken this precision for meaning.
The value is in the relation
It is tempting to ask which property of the sound makes it valuable.
Is it the frequency?
The rhythm?
The harmony?
The timbre?
The volume?
Sometimes one of these features matters greatly.
But none is sufficient.
The value lies in the relation between the sound and the organisation in which it occurs.
A minor chord is not intrinsically sad in the same sense that water is intrinsically wet. A particular rhythm does not carry a universal command to move. A timbre does not possess a fixed emotional meaning independent of context.
The same musical material can function differently in different situations.
That is not evidence that music is arbitrary.
It is evidence that value is relational.
The sound matters because of the system in which it participates.
From biological value to musical value
We can now see a possible continuity.
At the biological level, value differentiates the organism's possibilities.
At the social level, value differentiates the possibilities of interaction.
At the musical level, organised sound can participate in these relations by structuring time, attention, expectation and action.
This does not require music to be symbolic.
It requires only that music be organised value in social form.
That phrase may initially sound strange.
But consider what a musical performance actually does.
It establishes differences.
It makes some events expected and others surprising.
It makes some continuations easier and others more difficult.
It directs attention.
It coordinates performers.
It coordinates performers and listeners.
It can coordinate movement.
It can establish a shared temporal world.
The music is therefore not simply an object that we hear.
It is an activity in which we participate.
And participation is precisely where value becomes social.
Before the sign
We can now sharpen the question with which we began.
Why does a sound matter?
Because organisms are not indifferent systems.
They are organised around differences that affect their possibilities.
Why can one organism's sound matter to another?
Because organisms can become coupled through differences that alter their mutual behaviour.
Why can music matter to a group?
Because organised sound can stabilise patterns of attention, anticipation and coordination.
None of these answers requires symbolic meaning.
And that gives us a possible conceptual genealogy:
physical difference → biological value → social signal → coordinated activity → semiotic meaning
This should not be understood as a rigid evolutionary ladder. These forms overlap and interact. But the sequence identifies something important about dependence.
Meaning does not float free of the world.
It emerges within systems that already possess the capacity to discriminate differences that matter.
Before there can be a sign, there must be something for which a difference can make a difference.
Before there can be meaning, there must be significance.
And before significance can become symbolic, there can already be value.
Music brings this genealogy unusually close to the surface.
A sound enters the ear as physics.
It becomes significant through an organism.
It can become socially organised between organisms.
It can coordinate bodies without representing anything.
And only then, sometimes, does it become part of a system of meaning.
So perhaps the most fundamental question about a musical sound is not:
What does it signify?
but:
What possibilities does it change?
That question leads us from sound into life, from life into social organisation, and from social organisation toward the threshold of semiosis.
And at that threshold we encounter the signal.
Not yet a sign.
But no longer merely a sound.
No comments:
Post a Comment