1 The Value of Music: From Neural Bias to Social Resonance
What is music, and why does it matter? In the relational ontology we’ve been developing, music is not a universal language, nor a symbolic system of meaning like language itself. It is something else entirely — something rooted in our biology, shaped by our societies, and activated in real time by acts of performance and listening. In this view, music is a social system that instantiates a particular kind of material potential: the biological value systems evolved in the human brain.
Value as Biological Potential
Drawing on Edelman’s Theory of Neuronal Group Selection, we take value to refer to evolutionarily selected biases in neural functioning. These values are not meanings in themselves. Rather, they are biases or propensities for particular kinds of bodily or behavioural responses to experience.
These value systems form a core part of our biological potential — that is, the structured capacities of living bodies to act, feel, and respond. But these potentials do not express themselves automatically. They must be instantiated, and they are instantiated differently depending on context. Music is one such context.
Music as a Social System for Instantiating Value
Music is not just a form of individual expression. It is a social system: a set of collectively organised practices and roles that provide structured opportunities for instantiating biological value. Like dance or ritual, music enables humans to co-ordinate feeling and action — not through symbolic language, but through shared affective resonance.
Music’s organisation of rhythm, pitch, timbre, and pattern gives form to the unfolding of value-laden processes in time. These unfoldings are actualised in performance and listening, where neural systems respond, entrain, and adapt — not randomly, but according to socially patterned structures that have evolved with culture.
Music therefore activates biological potential in a social setting, enabling it to function as part of the social order — not just the biological one. This is how music contributes to social reality: not by symbolising it, but by modulating its underlying biological substrates in collective ways.
From Activation to Meaning: The Role of Consciousness
Value itself is not meaning — it is the biological substrate from which meanings can be construed. It is only when consciousness interprets the activation of value that it may become felt as emotion or as another kind of mental process. In this view, emotion is not raw feeling, but an act of semiotic construal: a meaning projected by consciousness onto activated biological processes.
Thus, the value of music is not simply emotional impact. It is its capacity to instantiate biological potentials in ways that can be socially shared and consciously construed — a process that is simultaneously material, social, and semiotic.
Conclusion: Grounding Music in a Relational Ontology
By grounding music in this relational ontology, we avoid the pitfalls of over-symbolising it (as if all sound were sign) or over-physicalising it (as if all sound were mere vibration). Instead, we situate music in the interplay of:
-
Material potential: the structured capacities of biological bodies,
-
Social organisation: the collective systems that activate and coordinate these capacities,
-
Semiotic construal: the interpretive processes by which consciousness makes meaning of what is felt.
Music matters because it sits at the very edge of meaning: where body meets society, and where sensation becomes significance.
2 Voice as Instrument, Voice as Meaning
The human voice is the most ancient of instruments — yet it is more than just a musical tool. In the relational ontology we’ve been developing, voice occupies a unique intersection between the material and the semiotic: it is both biological act and symbolic expression, both value-instantiating sound and meaning-bearing sign. To understand the voice in music, we must untangle these layered dimensions.
The Voice as Material Potential
At its most basic, the voice is a function of biological systems: breath, larynx, vocal tract, and fine motor control. It is rooted in material potential — the capacity of the body to act in time and space — and shaped by biological values: preferences for patterns, tones, and modulations selected for affective communication and social bonding.
When used as an instrument, the voice participates in music as a source of sound shaped by biological potential — modulating pitch, rhythm, and timbre in ways that activate value in the listener’s neurological system. Here, the voice functions like any other instrument, contributing to the affective texture of musical experience without necessarily conveying symbolic meaning.
The Voice as Semiotic Potential
But the voice is not only a source of sound; it is also a source of language. Spoken language is a semiotic system: it operates through strata of symbolic abstraction — phonology, lexicogrammar, semantics — to realise meaning. In singing, these strata are often maintained, suspended, or transformed. Lyrics, for example, retain the semiotic potential of language, while their musical rendering introduces additional layers of material actualisation.
Moreover, many paralinguistic features of voice — such as intonation, stress, and vocal tone — function semiotically in speech but can be recontextualised in music to serve a purely affective or aesthetic function. In song, these features may blur the boundary between sign and sound, making the voice a site of convergence between the semiotic and the material.
Dual Potentials, Dual Roles
To analyse music that features the voice, we must consider two complementary roles:
-
The voice as an instrument, instantiating material potential through the embodied production of sound — shaped by the biological and social potentials of performance.
-
The voice as a bearer of meaning, instantiating semiotic potential when it activates systems of symbolic abstraction — especially in the presence of language.
These roles do not merely coexist; they interact dynamically. For instance, the emotional impact of a sung phrase may arise not from its lexical content but from the affective shaping of its vocal delivery — the pitch bend, the breathiness, the vibrato. Conversely, a lyric may carry semantic weight that reframes how the listener interprets the surrounding musical elements.
From System to Instance: Actualising Voice in Performance
In each performance, the voice draws on multiple systems — biological, social, and semiotic — and actualises them in particular instances. These instances are always relational: shaped by the genre, the cultural context, the social roles of singer and listener, and the real-time affordances of the moment.
What is heard, then, is never the voice in general, but a singular instantiation of its potentials — a moment where meaning and value intertwine, not always distinguishably, but always relationally.
3 Voice, Instrument, and the Situatedness of Meaning
In this final post of the series, we turn to the question of context: not just how voice functions as instrument or sign, but how these functions are always situated in specific social, cultural, and material conditions. The relational ontology we have developed allows us to see musical meaning not as something intrinsic to the voice itself, but as something that emerges through relations — between systems, roles, and moments of actualisation.
Three Systems in Convergence
Every musical voice draws on at least three distinct but interwoven systems:
-
Biological systems: the voice is a process of the body, governed by neuromuscular coordination, respiratory control, and inherited value biases.
-
Social systems: the voice participates in patterned social activity — in performance roles, genre conventions, aesthetic norms, and interpersonal dynamics.
-
Semiotic systems: the voice may realise symbolic meaning — especially when language is involved — through the stratal architecture of language (phonology, lexicogrammar, semantics).
These systems are not merely layered; they are relationally instantiated in performance. A jazz vocalist scatting, a classical soprano performing an aria, a protestor chanting slogans — each draws differently on these systems and configures them according to their contextual relevance.
The Situatedness of Performance
Musical performance is never general; it is always particular — a situated instance of multiple potentials. And that situatedness matters.
For the musician, the voice is actualised through biological potential (breath, muscle control), shaped by socially patterned styles and techniques, and — where applicable — oriented toward the semiotic projection of meaning (e.g. lyrics, affective gesture).
For the audience, the voice is encountered not as raw sound, but through systems of value and meaning already shaped by experience, culture, and history. The same musical utterance may instantiate different meanings in different listeners — not because meaning is arbitrary, but because it is co-constructed through relational instantiation.
Meaning as Emergent Relation
From this perspective, meaning is not what the voice contains, but what it becomes in relation. It emerges from:
-
The values activated by the sound (biological),
-
The roles performed and recognised (social),
-
The meanings construed and interpreted (semiotic).
Importantly, these relations are not fixed. A wordless vocal may become a sign of mourning in one context and pure aesthetic texture in another. A phrase from a song may become a rallying cry, a nostalgic memory, or a simple melody. In every case, the meaning is not “in” the voice — it is made through situated processes of instantiation.
A Relational Understanding of the Voice
Our ontology helps us to see that the voice in music is not reducible to a single system or function. Rather, it is a site of dynamic interplay — where material and semiotic, biological and social, converge in the unfolding of processes.
And like all such sites, it is open-ended: the meanings it can instantiate are not predetermined, but continually shaped by the systems it draws on and the situations it is embedded within.
Coda: The Voice as a Site of Relation
Across this series, we have explored the voice in music not as an object or a code, but as a site of relations—a nexus through which different forms of potential are brought into actualisation. Whether functioning as instrument, symbol, or something in between, the voice reveals its meaning only in context, only through its role in a relational system of values, roles, and recognitions.
At every point, we have seen that meaning is not given; it is instantiated. It unfolds through processes grounded in biology, shaped in society, and projected through symbolic systems. The voice does not carry meaning like a container—it becomes meaningful when its activation resonates with the systems it inhabits.
This perspective allows us to analyse, perform, and experience music more attentively—not by asking what does the voice mean, but rather how does it mean in this particular moment, this particular setting, this particular relation?
In doing so, we find that the voice—so often taken for granted—is not a thing at all, but a process: of making, of doing, of becoming. And in that process, it reveals not just sound, but the unfolding of human life as meaning.
No comments:
Post a Comment