Resonant Systems: Music, Value, and Meaning

In our ongoing development of a relational ontology grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and informed by Edelman’s Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (TNGS), we’ve taken a fresh look at the nature of music—what it is, what it does, and how it means.

A key clarification in this view is that music is not itself a semiotic system. It does not consist of signs that symbolise meanings in the way language, mathematics, or gesture do. Rather, music is a social system that selects and activates patterns of biological value. These values are inherited biases in neural functioning—evolutionarily selected tendencies that guide attention, behaviour, and learning according to what has proven adaptively advantageous to our ancestors. Musical sound targets the functioning of value systems directly.

So while music does not construe meaning in the sense used in SFL, it does activate the systems from which symbolic meaning can be construed. It brings somatic potential into shared social space, where consciousness may interpret its effects through the lens of emotion, memory, or other mental processes. In doing so, music participates in the broader ecology of meaning—not by encoding messages, but by resonating across bodies and contexts in ways that matter.

This resonance is not symbolic but somatic: a functional synchrony between two complex systems operating in time. The patterned material dynamics of music unfold in ways that can entrain the listener’s own biological rhythms—heart rate, breath, neural oscillation. When these dynamics resonate with the dynamics of value systems, they amplify or modulate value-category activations. These activations are the basis of what consciousness later construes as feeling, emotion, or drive.

Emotion, in this view, is a mental process that interprets these activations semiotically. And when language enters the scene, it gives symbolic form to these construals—projecting them into shared meaning and memory.

This account allows us to preserve the crucial distinction between symbolic systems (like language) and value-selecting systems (like music), while also recognising that both are part of the complex network of meaning-making in human life. Music, in this view, becomes a site where biology, culture, and consciousness meet—not in signification, but in activation and resonance. It operates not by representing meaning, but by resonating with the very systems from which meaning is ultimately construed.