Why Song?

What Makes Song Unique? Exploring the Cultural, Cognitive, and Relational Power of Song

Song is often taken for granted as simply “music with words” or “lyrics set to melody.” But this misses the deeper truth: song is a unique relational form—a dynamic synergy of language, music, voice, and time—that creates experiences unattainable by either language or music alone.

In this post, we explore what song makes possible, and why it matters for how we understand meaning, affect, and human connection.

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Song as a Relational Form

Unlike spoken language, which unfolds primarily through symbolic, sequential meaning, and unlike instrumental music, which evokes affective value non-symbolically, song brings these two systems together in a lived temporal and embodied experience.

The voice mediates this union, carrying semantic content and at the same time enacting affective value through timbre, pitch, phrasing, and expression.

This creates a relational synergy where:

• Meaning is not only heard but felt deeply in the body and time;

• Affect is not only experienced but given form through language;

• Time is not only passed but held and reshaped to intensify emotional and interpretive experience.

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Experiences Emergent Only in Song

This synergy allows song to create forms of experience that are impossible in speech or music alone. These include:

• Simultaneity: Song holds semantic, affective, social, and temporal layers together in a single unfolding event;

• Affective depth: Song’s temporal structures (repetition, modulation, drift) create affective arcs of tension, release, and transformation;

• Communal function: Song’s repeated forms bind individuals into shared memory and identity;

• Cognitive complexity: The voice’s embodied mediation allows listeners to navigate multiple value and meaning orientations dynamically.

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Challenging Notions of Mode and Multimodality

Song pushes us to rethink rigid distinctions in semiotic theory. It is not simply a “mode” among others but a complex configuration of symbolic and non-symbolic systems dynamically entangled through embodied temporality.

Understanding song requires expanding multimodal theory to account for value systems, embodied voice, and temporality as integral components of meaning-making.

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Evolutionary, Developmental, and Social Stakes

Song is not just culturally contingent; it likely plays an important evolutionary role in:

• Regulating affect and social bonding through shared musical–vocal experience;

• Supporting early developmental regulation of infant–caregiver interaction through proto-song;

• Enabling cultural memory, protest, and identity formation through ritual and performance.

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Conclusion

Song is a unique form of human meaning-making, one that enacts and sustains life-affirming value through a synergy of language, music, voice, and time.

Recognising this uniqueness opens new avenues for linguistic theory, musicology, cognitive science, and cultural studies, enriching our understanding of what it means to be human.

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2 What Is a Song Doing to You? Understanding the Power of Song as a Value Intervention

We often ask, “What does a song mean?” but the deeper question might be, “What is a song doing to you?” Beyond words and melody, a song acts on your body, your emotions, and your sense of time. It’s a complex intervention into your lived experience.

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Song as a Value Terrain

Recall that music is a non-symbolic system of value, shaping affective states related to homeostasis—tension and release, threat and safety, anticipation and resolution. When combined with language, song becomes a value terrain where semantic meaning and embodied feeling dance together.

This terrain:

• Orients listeners towards life-affirming states,

• Offers affective safety even with difficult themes (Veiling),

• Amplifies emotional charge through repetition and escalation (Irradiation),

• Allows subtle shifts in meaning over time (Drift).

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The Voice as the Embodied Interface

The voice is the crucial interface where language and music meet. Its timbre, phrasing, and dynamics convey layers of meaning beyond words, linking embodied states to symbolic content.

This is why the same lyric can feel profoundly different when spoken, whispered, or sung—with variations in vocal delivery shaping the emotional and interpretive experience.

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Song as Temporal Experience

Song reshapes time, allowing listeners to inhabit and extend emotional moments. Through looping, modulation, and recapitulation, it constructs affective arcs that guide meaning unfolding not as a linear narrative but as a felt journey.

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Song’s Social and Cultural Power

By engaging bodies and voices collectively, song creates shared emotional spaces that sustain memory, identity, and community. It acts as a medium of social cohesion, protest, and ritual.

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Why This Matters

Understanding song as a value intervention—a dynamic system shaping embodied experience and meaning—opens new ways to approach music, language, cognition, and culture.

It invites us to ask not only “What does a song mean?” but “What does a song do?”

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3 Song and the Human Condition: Evolutionary, Developmental, and Social Dimensions

Song is deeply woven into the fabric of human life. To understand its power, we must consider its roots in biology, development, and society.

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1. Evolutionary Origins: Song as Adaptation for Connection and Regulation

• Song likely evolved as a mechanism to regulate affect and foster social bonding.

• Vocal music shares traits with infant–caregiver interaction, suggesting roots in early attachment and affect regulation.

• Group singing enhances cohesion and collective identity, serving survival and social coordination functions.

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2. Developmental Trajectories: Proto-Song and Emotional Regulation

• Infants use proto-song—intoned vocalisations with rhythmic and melodic elements—to soothe and engage caregivers.

• Early vocal play and singing scaffold affect regulation and language development.

• Song supports cognitive and emotional development through embodied temporal experience.

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3. Social and Cultural Functions: Memory, Protest, and Identity

• Songs encode cultural memory, carrying histories, narratives, and values across generations.

• Song functions as protest and resistance, mobilising affective energy and collective identity.

• Ritual song binds communities, marking rites of passage, seasons, and social roles.

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4. Implications for Understanding Meaning and Value

• Song’s evolutionary and social roles highlight the inseparability of meaning, value, and embodiment.

• Meaning in song is always embedded within affective, temporal, and social contexts.

• This perspective challenges purely symbolic or text-centric models of meaning.

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Conclusion

By situating song within biological, developmental, and social frameworks, we appreciate its unique capacity to shape human experience and meaning.

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4 Why Song Matters: A Synthesis of Meaning, Value, and Human Experience

Throughout this series, we have explored why song is a unique and powerful form of human expression—one that cannot be reduced to music plus language, but instead emerges as a dynamic synergy of meaning, value, voice, and time.

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Song as a Relational Form

Song unites symbolic language and non-symbolic musical value into an embodied, temporal experience. The voice mediates this union, allowing semantic meaning to be deeply felt through affective modulation and temporal shaping.

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Emergent Experiences Unique to Song

This synergy generates experiences unavailable in speech or instrumental music alone:

• Simultaneous layers of meaning and affect;

• Temporal trajectories that hold, delay, and transform emotional moments;

• Communal bonding through shared musical and linguistic ritual;

• Cognitive complexity grounded in embodied, enactive experience.

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Song as Value Intervention

Song acts as a system of value modulation that regulates homeostasis and affective states, offering life-affirming experiences through repetition, modulation, and drift. It is a profound intervention into our lived experience, shaping what a song does to us, not just what it means.

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Evolutionary, Developmental, and Social Significance

Rooted in evolutionary adaptations for social bonding and affect regulation, and central to developmental processes, song also functions culturally as memory, protest, and identity. This highlights the inseparability of meaning, value, embodiment, and social context in song.

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Implications for Theory and Practice

Recognising song’s unique nature challenges traditional boundaries between language, music, and meaning. It calls for relational, multimodal theories that account for temporal experience and embodied value.

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Final Thought

Song is a uniquely human mode of making meaning and sustaining life—an art form where voice, time, and value converge to shape the fabric of our emotional and social worlds.

Veiling, Irradiation, and Drift: A Typology of Meaning–Value Interplay in Song

1. Introduction: Song as Synergy of Meaning and Value

In the context of relational ontology, song emerges as a dynamic interface where two distinct systems—language (a symbolic semiotic) and music (a non-symbolic value system)—interact. While language construes meaning through symbolic systems of choice, music operates as a structured field of value dynamics. When these systems converge in song, they generate layered experiential effects that are more than additive. This paper introduces a formal typology—Veiling, Irradiation, and Drift—to account for the ways linguistic meaning and musical value co-articulate in song. These terms are not metaphorical but functional: each describes a specific mode of interaction with implications for homeostatic regulation, affective resonance, and meaning construction.

2. Conceptual Foundations: Value Systems and Affective Dynamics

Drawing on Edelman’s theory of value systems, we understand music as a non-semiotic social system that exploits affective value to simulate or support homeostatic regulation. Musical structures do not symbolise meaning but instead evoke and modulate embodied states—orientations of tension and release, threat and resolution—that mirror survival-relevant dynamics. Language, by contrast, is symbolic and paradigmatic, operating through meaning potentials actualised in context.

When the two systems interact in song, the result is a layered field where value and meaning influence one another—each shaping the listener’s affective orientation and interpretive stance. The voice, as embodied interface, mediates this interplay by bearing both semantic and affective load.

3. Voice as Interface

The voice functions as a point of convergence for music and language. It carries semantic content, but also enacts value through pitch, tension, phrasing, and timbre. The voice is not simply a channel but a dynamic modulator that links bodily states to meaning structures. In the context of song, the voice plays a critical role in realising the synergy types described below. It can soften, intensify, or subtly shift the meaning of a phrase, depending on how it enacts value.

4. A Typology of Synergy Types

The following typology outlines three core types of functional interplay between linguistic meaning and musical value in song. Each is a dynamic process emergent from the constraints and affordances of both systems.

4.1 Veiling

Definition: A functional dynamic in which musical value acts to soften, obscure, or buffer the semantic impact of difficult or dissonant lyrics.

Mechanism: Music enacts a stable or soothing value orientation—e.g. through upbeat rhythm, warm timbre, or consonant harmony—that mitigates the emotional force of the lyrics.

Function: Veiling enables the listener to engage affectively with challenging semantic content without overwhelm. It supports affective tolerance and interpretive ambiguity.

Example: An upbeat pop arrangement accompanying lyrics about violence or despair.

4.2 Irradiation

Definition: A process whereby repeated lyrical material gains new semantic intensity through musical and vocal emphasis.

Mechanism: Through musical repetition, escalation, or harmonic modulation, a lyric line accrues affective charge, extending its semantic resonance beyond initial construal.

Function: Irradiation creates emergent meaning through temporal unfolding. It intensifies affective response and expands interpretive range without altering lexical content.

Example: A chorus repeated with rising dynamics or harmonic shifts that transforms its meaning over time.

4.3 Drift

Definition: A functional phenomenon in which repeated lyrics undergo gradual shifts in perceived meaning due to subtle changes in musical context or vocal delivery.

Mechanism: Variations in phrasing, articulation, dynamics, or harmonic setting change the listener’s construal of repeated lines.

Function: Drift enacts the temporality of value–meaning interplay, allowing stable text to participate in dynamic affective movement.

Example: A refrain that moves from hopeful to resigned as vocal tone and accompaniment shift subtly across verses.

5. Relation to Systemic Functional Theory

This typology complements systemic functional linguistics by addressing the non-symbolic dimension of meaning–making in song. While SFL accounts for systems of meaning (ideational, interpersonal, textual), it has no apparatus for theorising musical value as a non-semiotic social system. Veiling, Irradiation, and Drift operate not within the grammar of language, but at the interface between symbolic meaning and embodied value.

These synergy types show how music does not "express" meaning in a symbolic sense, but co-determines the conditions under which linguistic meaning is construed, shifted, or sustained.

6. Implications and Further Directions

By formalising these synergy types, we provide a framework for analysing song as a dynamic intersystemic process. This opens pathways for:

• Theorising other semiotic–non-semiotic interfaces (e.g. gesture, movement)

• Extending relational ontology to multimodal experience

• Rethinking embodiment not as expressive output, but as constitutive of value-realising systems

These concepts—Veiling, Irradiation, and Drift—are proposed as foundational categories for understanding how meaning lives and moves within the value terrains of song.

The Voice as Interface

1 Breath, Body, and Social Value

The human voice is more than an instrument of expression. It is an interface—a point of contact and coordination between multiple systems: bodily, affective, social, and semiotic.

In this post, we return to the voice not as a symboliser of meaning, nor merely as a carrier of melody, but as a value-bearing act. We ask: what does it mean to voice? And what kinds of value dynamics are activated when we do?

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Voice as Modulated Breath

At its most elemental, the voice is shaped breath:

• Air pushed from the lungs,

• Modulated by the diaphragm, throat, and vocal folds,

• Resonated through the cavities of the mouth, chest, and skull,

• Released as vibration in the air.

But this physical process is not neutral. It is value-laden from the start.

The body’s control of breath reflects and regulates internal state:

• Shallow, rapid breath signals urgency or panic.

• Deep, slow breath calms arousal and extends control.

• Catching the breath, holding it, gasping—all index shifts in value relation: hesitation, shock, surrender, restraint.

The voice emerges from this dynamic system—not after it, but through it.

To voice is to externalise the internal: not as description, but as modulation.

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From Breath to Social Regulation

These embodied dynamics do not remain private. The voice is inherently social.

• It signals availability: who is open, closed, dominant, deferential.

• It coordinates proximity: calling, soothing, warning, inviting.

• It enacts relation: intimacy, authority, play, withdrawal.

Vocal qualities such as tone, pitch, tempo, and volume are learned through social feedback—but they also index bodily state. The voice becomes a regulatory interface, aligning self-regulation with intersubjective coordination.

What we often call “tone of voice” is a relational posture. It encodes:

• How the speaker positions themselves in relation to the listener.

• What is being demanded, withheld, surrendered, or confirmed.

Even before words arrive, the voice acts.

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Social Constraint and Cultural Patterning

The value dynamics of voice are not biologically fixed. They are culturally shaped and socially stratified.

• What counts as “appropriate voicing” differs by context, community, and role.

• Some voices are valued: clear, resonant, composed.

• Others are policed: too loud, too emotional, too soft, too “foreign.”

Voicing is thus not just a physiological act—it is a site of social inscription.

To learn to speak or sing “well” in a given tradition is to learn:

• Which value postures are rewarded.

• How to sound regulated, recognisable, or reverent.

• When to suppress, amplify, or distort the body's felt impulse to voice.

These patterns are often gendered, racialised, classed, or colonially inflected.

And they shape not just how voices are used—but how they are heard.

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Singing as Voice Intensified

In song, the voice is stylised, extended, and amplified—but it remains a value interface.

• A sustained note is a suspended state.

• A sudden leap in pitch is a shift in affective orientation.

• A cracked note, a whisper, a belt—they are not errors but inflections of felt constraint.

Singing makes the regulation of value audible.

It turns what is normally compressed in conversational speech—hesitation, release, vulnerability—into foregrounded dynamics, shaped in time and shared across bodies.

This is why the singing voice often moves us before we understand the words.

It is not expressing meaning. It is enacting value. And in doing so, it prepares the terrain for language to enter.

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The Interface in Motion

We are now in a position to understand the voice as a system in between:

• Between body and culture,

• Between value and meaning,

• Between affective urgency and symbolic articulation.

It is not reducible to its material base, nor fully determined by social form.

It is a modulated space of coupling, where aliveness becomes communicable, and sociality becomes felt.

In the next post, we’ll explore how this embodied interface becomes a structured system of value modulation in different vocal traditions and genres—and how these dynamics shape what kinds of meanings can be sung.

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2 Voicing Value: Social Patterning and Vocal Constraint

In our last post, we explored the voice as a value-bearing interface:

A system that modulates felt experience in time, through shaped breath and bodily tension, before—and sometimes without—the arrival of symbolic meaning.

Now we turn to how this value system becomes socially patterned:

How cultures regulate the voice,

How genres stylise it,

And how particular ways of voicing come to carry recognisable social meanings, not as semiotic tokens, but as configurations of value orientation.

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The Voice as Regulated Medium

Voicing is not a free biological act—it is socially constrained from the start.

From infancy, vocal gestures are responded to, disciplined, reinforced:

• Who is allowed to be loud, or soft?

• Who is told to “speak properly”?

• Whose tremble, laugh, break, or breathiness is marked as “authentic,” and whose as “wrong”?

Across time, communities develop patterned expectations for voicing:

• Religious chant may emphasise purity and restraint.

• Blues and gospel may foreground breath, grit, and rupture.

• Opera values projection, control, and sustained resonance.

These are not just aesthetic preferences. They are value systems:

• Telling us what kinds of emotional posture are permitted,

• What kinds of bodily self-presentation are affirmed,

• And how power, intimacy, devotion, or defiance are to be vocally realised.

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Vocal Gesture as Value Orientation

Let’s consider a few examples of how vocal gestures function in this terrain—not as semantic signs, but as value enactments:

➤ Vibrato

A sustained pitch oscillation.

• In classical traditions: a sign of vocal maturity, control, emotional intensity.

• In some folk traditions: used sparingly, or even avoided as overly ornamental.

Value effect: Vibrato creates a felt tension within stability—a kind of affective shimmer that conveys aliveness, richness, emotional density.

➤ Breaks and Cracks

The voice “breaks” under pressure—failing to maintain continuity.

• In many pop and soul traditions, this is prized as authenticity—the feeling overwhelming the form.

• In other settings, it may be treated as failure or lack of control.

Value effect: The crack enacts excess—where inner pressure breaches formal boundaries. It marks vulnerability, exposure, sometimes transcendence.

➤ Ornamentation

Melismatic runs, glides, trills, and improvisatory flourishes.

• In gospel, qawwali, or South Indian classical music, ornamentation is central.

• In Western choral settings, it may be marginal or disallowed.

Value effect: Ornamentation often expresses overflow—a surplus of feeling that cannot be contained in a single pitch or phrase. It can signal joy, lament, awe, or playful mastery.

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Vocal Genres as Value Systems

Each vocal genre offers a structured environment for value orientation.

It teaches singers:

• How to shape time (phrasing, breath, pacing),

• How to navigate constraint (range, dynamics, affective register),

• And how to enact relationship through vocal posture.

Genres do not simply organise sound—they encode lifeworlds:

• In flamenco: passion and anguish are voiced through tension, strain, ornament, and sudden dynamic shifts.

• In lullabies: gentleness is voiced through steady rhythm, soft tone, limited range—invoking safety, not intensity.

• In protest songs: grain, rupture, repetition, and crowd participation signal solidarity and urgency.

These are not “meanings” in the usual sense. They are configurations of value enactment:

Ways of placing the body in sound—within a world.

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Voicing as Situated Practice

To voice in a genre is to enter a social discipline of value.

To listen across genres is to learn the syntax of constraint and the affective logic of form.

In this way, the voice becomes:

• A site of social memory,

• A space of cultural struggle,

• A medium of transformation—where value is not just transmitted, but lived.

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In our next post, we’ll turn toward voice and identity: how particular voices come to be marked (or erased), and how vocal performance becomes a terrain of resistance, affiliation, or self-making.

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3 Marked Voices: Identity, Constraint, and the Struggle to Sound

Not all voices are heard the same. Some are granted authority, clarity, resonance.

Others are marked, marginalised, silenced, or hyper-audible.

In this post, we explore how voicing—far from being a neutral expressive act—is shaped by social structures of recognition and constraint.

We ask: Who gets to voice without friction?

Whose voices are heard as meaningful, beautiful, trustworthy?

And what happens when a voice resists the constraints imposed on it?

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Voices Are Always Situated

Every voice is formed at the intersection of:

• Bodily difference (size, age, health, sex),

• Social location (race, gender, class, nation),

• Cultural training (accent, register),

• And situational role (public/private, dominant/subordinate, insider/outsider).

The voice you learn to produce—and the one others learn to hear—is shaped by what your body is allowed to sound like in the world you inhabit.

Voicing, then, is not just an act of self-expression.

It is a social performance under constraint.

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Markedness in Vocal Norms

Some voices are always already marked:

• A woman who speaks with authority may be called “shrill.”

• A racialised accent may be heard as “unintelligible” or “inappropriate.”

• A queer voice may be mimicked, policed, or fetishised.

• A disabled or atypical vocal body may be rendered “inexpressive” or “abject.”

These are not reactions to sound per se, but to value assignments projected onto sound:

• Control is heard where it is expected.

• Emotion is praised when it is sanctioned.

• Authenticity is conferred where cultural legibility is already granted.

Thus, some voices must work harder to be heard at all—let alone to be heard as true.

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Singing Against the Grain

In song, these dynamics do not disappear—but they can be reframed, reworked, or resisted.

• A tremble once dismissed as weakness can become a mark of style.

• A breathy, broken voice can carry emotional force.

• A coded accent can become a badge of solidarity.

• A hyper-visible vocal gesture can flip from caricature to critique.

Singing allows performers to reclaim their own constraints—to stylise what was stigmatised, to embody excess where control was demanded.

Examples abound:

• Billie Holiday’s behind-the-beat phrasing and fragile tone—haunting, deliberate, resistant.

• Nina Simone’s grain, refusal of polish, and genre transgression.

• Antony and the Johnsons’ evocation of gender liminality through falsetto and vulnerability.

• Indigenous singers using traditional vocal textures within popular forms, asserting cultural continuity.

These are not just performances of feeling. They are strategies of voicing under pressure—artful negotiations with regimes of value.

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The Struggle to Sound

To sing with a marked voice is to inhabit tension:

• Between self and system,

• Between form and resistance,

• Between the urge to voice and the cost of being heard.

But in that tension lies potential.

The marked voice does not only reflect marginality. It can:

• Disrupt dominant value codes,

• Generate new modes of listening,

• Create space for alternative affiliations and solidarities.

The act of voicing becomes a site of struggle and transformation.

Not despite its constraint—but through it.

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Toward a Politics of Voice

If we take the voice seriously as a value-bearing interface, we must also take seriously:

• The systems that organise who gets to voice and how they are heard,

• The cultural grammars that naturalise some vocal expressions while pathologising others,

• And the ways in which people sing into these grammars, sometimes to inhabit them, sometimes to rupture them.

In the final post of this series, we’ll bring these threads together to ask:

What kind of value system is song?

What does it offer, enact, or make possible in a world where not all voices are equal?

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4 Singing the System: Voice, Value, and the Politics of Form

In this final post, we draw together what this series has proposed:

• That the voice is a dynamic interface between physiology, affect, and social constraint,

• That voicing is value enactment, shaped and patterned by cultural systems,

• And that singing, especially, becomes a site of intensified negotiation between self and structure, impulse and form.

Now we ask: what kind of system is song?

And what does it afford—especially for those whose voices are not freely heard?

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Song as a Value System

We’ve argued that music is not a semiotic system—it does not construe meaning through symbols.

Instead, music (and by extension, vocal performance) operates as a value system:

• It generates affective states,

• It moves bodies toward or away from homeostatic equilibrium,

• It scaffolds felt orientations to self, other, time, and constraint.

The singing voice is shaped by this system:

• It rides the waves of tension and resolution.

• It marks constraint, excess, restraint, overflow.

• It locates the self within a structured field of values.

But voice also brings with it the semantic and social baggage of language, gender, race, identity, history.

So song becomes a field of imbrication—where different systems cross and interfere.

And in that interference, something powerful happens.

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Singing as Revaluation

When language enters the value terrain of song, it can be transformed:

• A lyric that might be flat on the page gains intensity when broken by breath.

• A phrase repeated across shifting harmonies acquires new inflections of memory or desire.

• A voice that is socially marked becomes emotionally central—not peripheral.

This is more than expression. It is revaluation.

Song gives us tools to:

• Re-weight what matters,

• Re-order what is foregrounded or backgrounded,

• Re-inscribe bodily constraint as form, as beauty, as power.

It creates a space where value itself can be felt differently.

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Song as an Ethics of Constraint

Crucially, song does not erase constraint. It works through it.

• A voice strains toward a note it can’t quite reach.

• A breath falters under the burden of a phrase.

• A cry is shaped into a melodic figure—made bearable, transmissible, even repeatable.

In song, constraint becomes audible—not as failure, but as form.

This is a kind of ethics: not the denial of pressure, but its rendering as structure.

Not the fantasy of freedom, but the art of voicing within constraint—and sometimes against it.

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Singing the System

So what is song, finally?

It is not the layering of melody over words.

It is a mode of living value in time—bodily, socially, and symbolically.

It allows us to:

• Feel what meaning cannot name,

• Voice what value cannot speak,

• And inhabit what constraint makes possible.

In song, the body becomes intelligible in new ways.

Meaning moves with breath.

Constraint becomes shape.

And the voice, long regulated, sings back—

Not just what it was taught,

But what it has become.

The Logic of Aliveness: Music and the Value of Life

1 The Social Power of Music Without Meaning

Why does music move us so deeply, so reliably, and so universally—when it doesn’t mean anything?

Music doesn’t refer. It doesn’t name objects, state facts, or assert claims. It doesn’t signify in the way language does. And yet it fills our lives with joy, sorrow, power, intimacy, beauty. It compels us to move, to sing, to cry, to connect. It shapes collective feeling and carves out the deep rhythms of our inner life. All without a single word.

This is the puzzle that opens our series. If music isn’t a semiotic system—if it doesn’t mean—then how does it work? How does it exert such rich and reliable effects, both personally and socially?

Our working hypothesis is this:

Music is not a system of meaning, but a system of value.

It doesn’t tell us what to think—but it shapes what we feel. And more profoundly: it shapes how we move through feeling, how we inhabit affective states, and how we regulate the embodied tension between comfort and disruption, calm and arousal, cohesion and intensity.

In this sense, music functions as a kind of value terrain. It sets in motion felt dynamics—states of tension, anticipation, suspension, resolution—and lets us travel through them, in time. These are not metaphorical versions of emotional life. They are, quite directly, the very dynamics of embodied regulation that underwrite our emotional and social lives in the first place.

So we don’t just respond to music—we live in it. We inhabit it as a space of simulated aliveness. And crucially, we do so in concert with others. Music gives us not only a space to feel, but a shared field to move and regulate feeling together.

We might think of this as a kind of social pheromone system—a non-symbolic but highly coordinated means of aligning bodies and states. Just as ants use chemical trails to guide movement without cognition or signification, humans use music to align affect and behaviour across a group, without meaning a thing.

In this series, we’ll explore how this works. We’ll draw on the work of Gerald Edelman, a neuroscientist who argued that value—not representation—is the primary driver of behavior. We'll trace how music activates the same core dynamics that govern life itself: homeostasis, threat and restoration, arousal and return, and the shaping of possibility through value. And we’ll argue that it’s precisely this—music’s ability to simulate and safely modulate life-affirming states—that makes it so powerful, so rewarding, and so central to human culture.

Music doesn’t have to mean. It just has to move.

And it does.

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2 Value Before Meaning: Edelman and the Homeostatic Brain

In our opening post, we proposed that music doesn’t function through meaning, but through value. It shapes what we feel, not what we think. It activates and regulates states of tension and release, not through signs or symbols, but by modulating embodied experience itself.

To ground this idea more precisely, we turn now to the work of Gerald Edelman, a neuroscientist whose theory of consciousness and cognition centred not on representation or logic, but on value-driven dynamics.

For Edelman, the most basic fact about life is this: organisms must stay alive. And staying alive means maintaining a set of internal conditions—temperature, hydration, oxygen, nutrients, social bonding—within viable bounds. These are not just passive baselines. They are actively regulated states, managed by systems he calls homeostats.

Each homeostat is governed by what Edelman calls a value system—a biologically grounded mechanism that evaluates states of the body and environment and triggers actions to restore balance when those states drift too far. This value system is not about meaning. It’s about directionality: it biases behaviour toward life-sustaining outcomes.

The key insight is this:

Value precedes categorisation. Feeling comes before knowing.

Or, in Edelman’s own terms:

“Categorisation is not the same as value, but rather occurs on value.”

In other words, we don’t begin by identifying and labelling the world. We begin by feeling it—by sensing whether things are good or bad for us, whether they move us toward or away from equilibrium. Meaning emerges only later, as a developmental elaboration on top of these primary value systems.

This has major implications for how we understand behaviour, experience, and—crucially—music.

Categorisation on Value

Edelman argues that most of what the brain learns doesn’t arise from direct genetic coding, but through a process he calls somatic selection. Neural groups are generated with a great deal of variability, and through experience—under the influence of value—they are selected, strengthened, and stabilised. What matters is not the symbolic content of a stimulus, but how it affects the body’s homeostatic trajectory.

So categorisation—the formation of stable response patterns to the world—is not purely cognitive. It is an epigenetic event, shaped by the body's evaluative feedback. It doesn’t occur unless the system has value-based circuitry to guide the selection process. But that circuitry, on its own, doesn't determine the outcome. It merely sets the conditions for development—a kind of potential field upon which neural experience will carve its actual shape.

Edelman again:

“Without prior value, somatic selectional systems will not converge into definite behaviours.”

This means that value systems don't just direct behavior—they also shape what becomes meaningful in the first place.

From Value to Experience

So: all action, perception, and learning begin in value. Not in representation. Not in concept. Not in symbol. What this gives us is a picture of a dynamic body, moving and sensing in an environment, constantly adjusting to maintain viability, guided not by what things mean but by what they do—to its equilibrium, to its potential for survival, to its felt condition.

And here we begin to see the resonance with music.

Because music, too, does not operate through representation. It does not provide categorisable input for somatic selection in the way language or image might. It offers instead a direct modulation of value states—states that resemble the body's own homeostatic fluctuations.

Rhythmic drive, tonal instability, melodic contour, harmonic tension and release—these are not signs to be interpreted. They are patterns of value fluctuation, simulated through sound, that we feel in our bodies as shifts in intensity, anticipation, relief, closure, and return.

Music doesn't tell us what’s happening. It happens to us. And that happening is governed not by interpretation, but by the dynamics of value regulation.

In the next post, we’ll explore how these dynamics unfold in time. We'll show how music functions as a simulated value terrain, staging felt states of disturbance and return, of tension and resolution, that echo the very structure of biological survival—and why it feels so profoundly good to move through them.

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3 Music as a Simulated Value Terrain

We’ve seen that value comes before meaning—that biological systems are shaped by what sustains life, not by what symbolises it. Edelman’s model showed us how homeostatic regulation, grounded in embodied value systems, underpins all behaviour and perception. Music, we’ve proposed, engages these systems directly, without the detour of symbolic categorisation.

But what exactly does music do?

In this post, we develop the idea that music operates as a simulated value terrain—a landscape of dynamic states that mimic the rhythms of homeostatic disturbance and restoration. By generating patterns of tension and resolution, instability and return, music stages the logic of survival. And in doing so, it creates a felt experience of moving through threat toward safety, imbalance toward balance—an experience that is not just pleasurable, but deeply life-affirming.

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Patterning the Felt: From Sound to System

Music unfolds in time. It is inherently processual, never statically present. And at every moment, it modulates the listener’s felt condition—not by naming things or describing situations, but by shaping the internal dynamics of expectation, pressure, and release.

• A rhythmic pulse creates forward motion and temporal predictability.

• A harmonic dissonance introduces tension—something feels unresolved, unstable.

• A melodic rise builds anticipation; a cadential return resolves it.

• A swelling crescendo heightens arousal, then dissipates into stillness.

These are not signs. They are value states, construed directly by the nervous system. They signal not “what” is happening, but how it feels—and even more precisely, what kind of trajectory the body is currently on: toward restoration? or deeper into imbalance?

This is precisely how homeostatic systems operate. They don’t care about representations. They care about directionality: are we returning to equilibrium, or moving away from it? Is this condition improving or worsening? Should we act—or rest?

Music activates this same evaluative orientation—but in a simulated space, where the stakes are affective, not survival-based. It lets us rehearse the very movements that keep us alive—without risk. It models the bodily experience of feeling off-centre and then re-centred, and in so doing, amplifies our sense of vitality.

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The Pleasure of Return

The pleasure of music is often the pleasure of coming back—of finding one’s way home after wandering.

This might be literal (a tonic resolution after harmonic tension) or structural (a return to a refrain or theme after variation). But in each case, the sense of restoration is not cognitive; it is felt. The body registers a return to equilibrium—a discharge of pressure, a recalibration of internal dynamics.

This is not metaphor. It is a direct experiential analogue of the body's homeostatic processes. Music makes value audible—not in the sense of moral or symbolic value, but in the sense of regulatory significance: this is stable; this is unstable; this is returning to form.

And because it all happens without actual threat—no danger, no dehydration, no death—music provides the emotional architecture of survival without its risks. It enacts the logic of living, in miniature, and allows us to feel the satisfaction of restoration, again and again.

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Simulated Threat, Safe Restoration

Why do we enjoy sadness in music? Why do we seek out dissonance, instability, tension?

Because music lets us touch these affective states safely. It lets us simulate grief, danger, and longing—not to indulge in them, but to move through them. The joy lies not only in the resolution, but in the felt traversal of the terrain itself.

In this way, music becomes a kind of training ground for value regulation—an aesthetic arena in which we rehearse the very patterns of resilience that define being alive.

• It creates deviation from equilibrium (through instability, surprise, suspense).

• It sustains that deviation long enough to be felt.

• It resolves the deviation, restoring balance and grounding.

This is not the work of representation. It is the structural mimicry of homeostatic life. And the body, attuned to these patterns from birth, knows how to feel them—long before it knows how to name them.

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In the next post, we’ll make this distinction even sharper. We’ll explore how music does not mean sadness or symbolise restoration, but rather enacts those states directly. It works not through signification, but through somatic modulation. It doesn’t tell us what to feel. It gives us a place to feel it—together, in motion, alive.

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4 Felt Patterns, Not Signified Messages

By now we’ve proposed that music is best understood not as a system of meaning, but as a system of value—one that simulates the very dynamics of homeostatic regulation. It stages affective states of tension, anticipation, instability, and return. It lets us rehearse survival without risk. And it does so not through ideas or concepts, but through direct modulation of embodied experience.

In this post, we clarify a crucial distinction:

Music doesn’t signify emotion—it patterns affect.

It doesn’t express meanings—it modulates states.

It doesn’t tell us what to feel—it gives us a structure in which to feel it.

This may seem like a subtle point. But it marks a fundamental divide between semiotic systems, which operate through symbolic representation, and non-semiotic systems like music, which operate directly on value-regulating dynamics.

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Music as Constraint, Not Communication

We often speak of music as a “language of emotion.” But this metaphor misleads. Music does not convey emotion in the way language conveys information. There is no codebook, no grammar of reference. There is no shared system of signs that map to fixed meanings.

Instead, music works more like a scaffold for embodied states. It provides a temporal structure within which the body can experience rhythms of arousal and release, tension and return, elevation and grounding.

The effects are repeatable and socially shared—not because we interpret the same symbols, but because we participate in the same value trajectory.

• A swelling crescendo doesn’t mean urgency; it feels urgent.

• A descending minor third doesn’t signify sadness; it invites a posture of retreat.

• A rhythmic break doesn’t stand for disruption; it creates the condition of destabilisation.

These are not messages. They are felt constraints—coaxing the body into states it already knows how to inhabit.

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Beyond Expression: Music as Enactment

When a string quartet builds unbearable tension, we are not receiving an expression—we are entering a state-space shaped by the dynamics of sound.

This is why music can produce states that words cannot. It doesn’t describe grief—it enacts its temporal logic. It doesn’t narrate hope—it sets it in motion, builds it, suspends it, tests it, releases it. These states don’t require interpretation. They register—directly, affectively, somatically.

This is not just a metaphor. The nervous system responds to these patterns in ways that closely parallel its responses to real-world value shifts. Heart rate, breath, posture, attention—all follow the curves of the musical terrain. In this sense, music runs the simulation of living.

And crucially: it lets us rehearse how to move through it.

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Non-Semiotic, Fully Social

At this point, we can return to an earlier comparison: music as a kind of social pheromone. Just as ant colonies use chemical trails to organise complex behaviour without symbolic thought, music enables humans to coordinate affective states, synchronise timing, and align attention—without signs, without referents.

In both cases, we see a system that is:

• Non-symbolic (not representational)

• Dynamic (unfolds through time)

• Socially consequential (regulates group behaviour)

• Value-driven (shapes action by modulating internal states)

Music, in this light, is not just “emotional expression.” It is a collective value system—a shared space for moving, feeling, and restoring together. It aligns bodies by activating the same rhythms that regulate life itself.

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What We Learn By Listening

So when we listen to music, we are not decoding a message. We are entering a pattern. We are entraining ourselves to a series of value fluctuations that simulate—and sometimes transform—the conditions of being alive.

And this is why music feels realer than real. Because it offers us a distilled encounter with the logic of survival: the capacity to sustain pressure, to find our way through imbalance, and to return, at last, to form.

In our final post, we’ll draw the threads together. We’ll reflect on why music matters—not just as art or entertainment, but as a deeply embodied, deeply social practice that sustains the rhythms of life.

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5 Why It Matters: Music as Life-Affirming Practice

Throughout this series, we’ve proposed a different way of understanding music. Not as a language. Not as a code. Not as a container of meanings. But as a system of value dynamics—a non-semiotic, embodied, relational system that simulates and shapes the rhythms of life itself.

We’ve seen that music doesn’t signify. It acts. It modulates. It sets bodies and nervous systems into motion, through patterned fluctuations of tension and release, deviation and return. These patterns aren’t symbolic. They are felt, lived, and shared.

And in being shared, they become profoundly social.

In this final post, we ask: why does this matter? What do we gain—philosophically, politically, existentially—by understanding music as a simulated value terrain? What does it help us to see?

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Music Rehearses Aliveness

At its core, music is a practice of restoration. It lets us experience threat without danger, deviation without breakdown, sadness without despair. It constructs a terrain where we can traverse the forms of suffering and survival—and arrive, again and again, at return.

This is not a trivial pleasure. It is a form of affective resilience.

By staging value fluctuations in a space of safety, music lets us train the rhythms of homeostatic life:

• how to endure imbalance,

• how to ride the wave of rising pressure,

• how to hold our breath in the not-yet,

• and how to feel, with others, the joy of resolution.

It reminds us: you can go through this. You can come back. You are still here.

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Music Aligns Bodies Without Words

In a world saturated with symbolic communication—where words often fail, falter, or fracture—music offers another mode of relation: alignment without interpretation.

It gives groups a shared temporal structure in which to feel. It synchronises nervous systems across bodies. It generates affective collectivity—not through meaning, but through movement, timing, co-regulation.

This is what makes it so central to ritual, to resistance, to grief, to celebration. When language breaks down, music steps in—not to explain, but to hold.

And in that holding, it sustains something deeply human: the experience of being alive, together.

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Music Is Not a Mystery. It’s a System.

Perhaps the greatest insight of this model is that music’s power is not mystical. It is not ineffable. It is not a divine accident. It is a structural consequence of how life regulates itself through value.

Music mimics that regulation. It triggers the same systems. It operates at the level where bodies feel their way back to balance. And in doing so, it reminds us: you are not just a meaning-maker. You are a value-navigator. A lifeform. A rhythm in motion.

To make music, or to be moved by it, is to rehearse being alive. Not to represent it. To be it.

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Coda: Music, Not Meaning

We don’t need to decode music. We need to feel it happen.

That happening is a dance through a value terrain—a traversal of affective shape and intensity, governed not by signs but by homeostatic logic. We follow the pull of resolution, the surge of dissonance, the settling of return—not because they mean something, but because they are something: states of the body, of the system, of the self in relation.

And this, perhaps, is the deepest lesson music teaches—not through telling, but through doing:

Life is not given in meaning.

It is given in motion.

And music is that motion, shaped in time, held in form, felt as value.