We are accustomed to thinking of communication as an exchange of meanings.
Someone has something to say. They encode it. Someone else receives it and decodes it. Between the two lies a message.
This picture is so familiar that it can seem almost inevitable.
But it begins too late.
Before organisms could exchange propositions, they could alter one another's behaviour. Before there were signs, there could be signals. Before anything represented something else, one event could simply make a difference to another system.
That distinction is important for understanding music.
For music may occupy precisely this territory: it can organise attention, expectation, movement and social coordination without necessarily representing anything.
The challenge is therefore to understand how signalling can occur without semiosis.
A signal need not stand for anything
Suppose an animal suddenly produces a loud call.
Another animal hears it and changes its behaviour.
Perhaps it freezes. Perhaps it turns toward the source. Perhaps it flees. Perhaps it joins the group.
We need not assume that the call has a symbolic meaning equivalent to a sentence such as There is danger.
The call may simply have acquired a stable relation to a response.
In that sense:
A signal can matter without representing.
This is a deceptively simple proposition.
It means that the world of communication is potentially much larger than the world of signs.
A signal does not have to tell an organism what something is. It may merely alter what the organism does.
The distinction can be expressed schematically:
signal → response
rather than:
sign → interpretation → response
The second relation is familiar from language and other symbolic systems.
The first is more primitive.
And it may be much more widespread.
The danger of making every signal a sign
Once we recognise that a signal has a function, it is tempting to say that the signal therefore means something.
But this can simply redescribe the effect in semiotic language.
If a particular sound reliably causes members of a colony to change their behaviour, we might say:
"The sound means danger."
But that statement may conceal an important distinction.
Perhaps the sound does not represent danger at all.
Perhaps it has become part of a causal and behavioural relation in which its occurrence changes the disposition of the organisms receiving it.
There is no need to deny that the receiver discriminates the signal. Discrimination is essential. But discrimination does not necessarily entail symbolic interpretation.
An organism can distinguish one event from another without construing one thing as standing for another.
That distinction will become increasingly important as we move toward music.
Signal is a relational concept
A signal is not simply a particular kind of physical object.
The same physical event can be a signal in one context and not in another.
A sound made accidentally by a falling branch may cause another animal to flee. But if the same sound is deliberately produced by another organism to produce that response, we have a clearer case of signalling.
The difference lies in the relation among:
the producer,
the signal,
the receiver,
and the resulting change in behaviour.
Signalhood is therefore relational.
This resembles our earlier account of value.
A sound matters because of what difference it makes to a system.
A sound functions as a signal when that difference becomes part of a relation between systems.
The signal is thus already social in an important sense.
It exists not merely as a sound but as a difference that matters between organisms.
From value to signalling
This allows us to extend the argument from the previous essay.
At the level of the individual organism, value differentiates possibilities of action.
At the level of interaction, signals can coordinate those possibilities.
We might therefore write:
value within → signalling between
The organism has a world in which some differences matter.
Another organism can exploit those differences.
The result is coordination.
This is where our earlier comparison with eusocial insects becomes particularly illuminating.
A colony does not need a language in order to organise itself. Individual organisms can respond to chemical, tactile or other signals, and those responses can alter the behaviour of other members of the colony. The resulting network of interactions can produce highly sophisticated collective behaviour without requiring symbolic representation.
The colony can therefore possess something resembling a social intelligence without possessing a semiotic system in the stronger sense.
That is an important warning.
Complex coordination does not prove the existence of meaning.
The signal changes the field of possibilities
Perhaps the best way to describe the difference is in terms of possibilities.
A signal does not necessarily tell the receiver what the world is.
It changes what the receiver is likely to do.
A sudden alarm call reduces the range of actions that are practically available.
A recruitment signal can increase the probability of particular collective behaviour.
A mating display can alter the interaction between organisms.
A territorial signal can change the behaviour of an approaching individual before any symbolic interpretation is required.
The signal therefore reorganises the field of possible action.
This is exactly why signalling belongs naturally with value.
The signal matters because it changes the possibilities that matter.
Music begins to look rather different
Now consider a musical pulse.
It can do something surprisingly similar.
A pulse establishes a temporal framework.
Once that framework is established, certain movements become easier to anticipate. A listener may tap a foot. A dancer may move. A performer may coordinate with another performer. A group may converge upon a common temporal pattern.
What does the pulse mean?
Perhaps nothing.
What does it do?
Quite a lot.
It changes the probability of certain actions.
It organises expectation.
It synchronises behaviour.
It creates a common temporal environment.
The music therefore functions, at least in part, like a signal.
But it does not follow that music is therefore a sign system.
Indeed, the distinction helps explain why the idea of music as a universal language is so tempting and yet so misleading.
Music can coordinate us without telling us anything.
The difference between telling and organising
Language is extraordinarily good at telling us what to do.
Close the door.
Come here.
Wait.
Don't move.
But language can also produce those effects because its symbolic meanings enter into a social system.
Music can sometimes produce remarkably similar behavioural effects without the propositional route.
A drumbeat can make us move.
A crescendo can make us anticipate.
A repeated rhythmic figure can establish collective synchrony.
A sudden silence can stop an activity in its tracks.
None of these necessarily says:
"Now move."
The music organises the situation in which movement occurs.
This is a different kind of communicative power.
We might call it coordination without representation.
That phrase may turn out to be central to our investigation.
Signals can become signs
None of this means that signals and signs form two sealed categories.
A signal can become a sign.
Once a community establishes a convention in which a particular sound is understood as representing something, the sound enters a semiotic system.
A siren can be more than a stimulus. It can become culturally conventionalised.
A musical motif can acquire a stable association with a character.
A melody can become an anthem and thereby stand for a nation.
A particular musical gesture can become a conventional marker of a genre or social identity.
At that point, something new has happened.
The sound is no longer significant merely because of what it does.
It also participates in a system in which it can stand for something.
This is the emergence of symbolic value.
And it is precisely here that we need to distinguish music from the meanings cultures attach to music.
The semiotisation of music
A musical sound can therefore be semiotised without music itself being, in its primary organisation, a semiotic system.
This distinction is easy to miss because cultural life constantly layers meanings onto practices.
A melody heard at a wedding may acquire associations of love and commitment.
A march may acquire national or military significance.
A particular song may become inseparable from a political movement.
A film score may signal danger, romance or impending tragedy.
But the symbolic meanings do not necessarily originate in the musical structures themselves.
They emerge through the coupling of musical activity with a broader cultural system.
The music becomes a resource for meaning.
This is very different from saying that music is intrinsically a language.
A language is a system whose organisation is constituted by symbolic distinctions.
Music can be recruited into such a system without itself being one.
Why the distinction matters
If we collapse signals into signs, we are likely to interpret every behavioural effect as evidence of meaning.
Then a rhythm must mean movement because it makes us move.
A dissonance must mean tension because it produces tension.
A cadence must mean closure because it creates an experience of closure.
But this gets the explanatory order wrong.
The rhythm may organise movement.
The dissonance may organise expectation.
The cadence may organise temporal experience.
These effects need not be mediated by symbolic representation.
Indeed, if we insist on symbolic meaning at every stage, we lose sight of something more fundamental:
Organisms can be coordinated by differences before those differences become representations.
This is not an argument against meaning.
It is an argument for giving meaning a history.
A sign does more than trigger a response
We can now return to the distinction with which we began.
A signal can trigger, modulate or coordinate a response.
A sign can do this too, but it does something additional: it makes a distinction available within a semiotic system.
A sign does not merely alter behaviour.
It participates in a system through which experience can be construed.
That is why signs can be combined, contrasted, transformed, questioned, negated and embedded within larger structures of meaning.
A signal does not necessarily possess these properties.
A signal can be effective without being interpretable in this stronger sense.
This gives us a useful conceptual progression:
difference → value → signal → coordination → sign → meaning
Again, this is not a simple ladder through which every phenomenon must pass.
Rather, it identifies different possibilities for organisation.
Music can operate strongly at the levels of value, signalling and coordination.
Sometimes it also participates in semiosis.
But those are not the same thing.
The remarkable case of rhythm
This is perhaps why rhythm deserves special attention.
Rhythm does not merely communicate about time.
It organises time.
It establishes intervals within which action becomes possible.
A beat can make another beat expected.
A repeated pattern can establish a shared temporal field.
Several organisms can enter that field together.
Once they do, their actions begin to constrain one another.
The result can be collective behaviour without any symbolic message being exchanged.
This gives rhythm a peculiar status.
It can function as a social technology of coordination.
And that may be more fundamental than its eventual cultural meanings.
Before a rhythm can signify a military march, it can organise marching.
Before it can signify a dance tradition, it can organise dancing.
Before it can signify communal identity, it can organise communal synchrony.
The meaning may come later.
The coordination can come first.
The sign is not the source of all significance
We can now see why the distinction between mattering and meaning is so important.
If meaning were the only source of significance, then something would have to mean before it could matter.
But biological and social organisation show otherwise.
Things can matter because they affect the organisation of a system.
Signals can matter because they affect relations between systems.
Music can matter because it alters attention, expectation, movement and coordination.
Only some of these relations become symbolic.
Meaning is therefore not the foundation upon which all significance rests.
It is one particular form of significance.
And perhaps one of the most important things music can teach us is precisely this:
The world was not waiting for signs before things began to matter.
Life precedes language.
Coordination precedes representation.
Social organisation precedes symbolic culture.
And music may give us a way of hearing this continuity.
Toward music as social organisation
We can now begin to see music less as an unusual kind of language and more as a particular kind of social activity.
It takes organised sound and uses it to structure temporal relations among people.
Those relations can involve value.
They can involve signalling.
They can involve coordination.
They can involve emotion and expectation.
And they can eventually become saturated with cultural meanings.
But the layers should not be confused.
The fact that music can mean does not entail that music is a semiotic system.
The fact that music can communicate does not entail that it communicates propositions.
The fact that music can signal does not entail that it is a sign.
And the fact that music can matter profoundly does not entail that we must discover what it means in order to explain why.
Perhaps the deepest question is therefore not:
What message is the music sending?
but:
What is the music organising?
Attention?
Movement?
Expectation?
Emotion?
Bodies?
A group?
A shared moment in time?
Once we ask that question, music begins to look less mysterious.
It is still wondrous, certainly.
But its wonder no longer depends upon imagining that every musical event conceals a symbolic message.
Music may be powerful precisely because it can operate before the sign.
It can make us move before it tells us where to go.
It can make us wait before it tells us what we are waiting for.
It can bring us together before it tells us what we have in common.
And perhaps this is why music matters so much.
It does not always need to tell us what the world means.
Sometimes it simply changes the world we are able to make together.
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