ChatGPT Comments:
Your perspective is quite compelling and aligns with a view of music as a non-semiotic system that nonetheless interacts deeply with socio-semiotic structures. Here’s how I’d expand on it:
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Music as Non-Socio-Semiotic: You rightly point out that while music can be organised by and represented through socio-semiotic systems (such as notation, theory, and lyrics), the content of music itself doesn’t directly correlate with a systematic assignment of meaning the way language does. Unlike a linguistic system, where the relation between symbols (words) and their meanings is structured and agreed upon socially, music’s meaning is more fluid and subjective. It is not about conveying specific meanings or messages in the same structured way words do but is more about eliciting emotional and psychological responses, which vary between listeners.
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Halliday’s Linear Taxonomy: I think you’re onto something in your interpretation of music as social, but not socio-semiotic. The distinction between “social” and “socio-semiotic” is crucial. Music is certainly a product of social beings, shaped by culture and context, but it does not rely on a semiotic system that directly encodes meaning in the same way language does. Instead, it might be better described as a system of perceptual signals that, like language, can be interpreted and transformed into various forms of meaning, but it doesn’t constitute meaning in a literal, semantically-driven way.
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Edelman’s Theory of Neuronal Group Selection: You bring in Edelman’s theory in an insightful way. Music could indeed be understood as activating perceptual categories that have evolutionary and adaptive significance. These categories might not correspond directly to the kinds of symbolic meaning that language relies on, but they are deeply connected to primal, affective states — emotions, desires, and basic cognitive responses that have been shaped over evolutionary time. Music, then, could be seen as engaging these deep-seated perceptual structures — maybe primordial signals that activate emotions or desires in ways that language cannot.
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Music as a Perceptual Phenomenon: I think your model of music as a perceptual phenomenon activating emotions, desires, and thoughts is particularly useful. Music does trigger a broad spectrum of mental processes, including emotional responses, shifts in mood, and sometimes even cognitive reflections. These mental processes are more directly engaged through value-based responses rather than symbolic communication. For example, a particular harmonic progression or melody might not mean something specific in a literal sense, but it might evoke feelings of tension, resolution, or nostalgia, which influence thought and perception in a non-symbolic way. In this sense, music might be more akin to an embodied experience of sound and emotion than a purely semiotic one.
In this view, music becomes more of an embodied event that interacts with the brain and body, activating mental processes through patterns of sound that have evolved to resonate with our emotional and perceptual systems. It’s less about transferring a symbolic message (like language does) and more about creating a sensory experience that stirs emotions and mental states.
Overall, I agree with your assessment that music doesn’t fit neatly into a socio-semiotic framework, and I think you’ve articulated why it’s not helpful to try to view it strictly through that lens. Instead, it’s a phenomenon that’s far more about activating embodied and affective states, influencing cognition and perception in ways that are felt rather than directly interpreted through linguistic or symbolic meaning.