The Musical Turn in Biosemiotics

Human music and language are two systems of communication and expression that, while historically considered to overlap, have become increasingly divergent in their approach and study. Music and language almost certainly co-evolved and emerged from the same semiotic field, and this relationship as well as co-origin are actively researched and debated. For the sake of evaluating the semiotic content of zoomusicology, we investigate music from a ‘bottom-up’ biosemiotic functionalist account considering iconic, indexical, and symbolic forms of meaning not in a hierarchy but according to their effects on agents. Such an approach avoids overintellectualizing the representational aspects of music, and instead inverts, as it were, the traditional hierarchy of semiotic categories to produce illocutionary effects. Understanding aesthetics and action not as a priori separate but rather fundamentally co-arising elements of the same events. The focus of musicality again returns to interpretation and how semiosis precipitates expression.


Introduction
Human music and language are two systems of communication and expression that have increasingly diverged in how they are approached and studied, which is surprising given that music and language almost certainly co-evolved and emerged from the same semiotic field.This article explores the different ways semiotics, the life sciences, and social sciences consider music and language, and discusses the consequences for the field of biosemiotics.In particular, we champion expressivist models of music and push back against linguistic bias, which privileges indexical and symbolic forms of meaning over the iconic.
In their most separated instantiations, language is a referential system of communication permitting shorthand extrapolation useful to passing on messages, even if their quality is degraded in the passing as the messages become increasingly decontextualized. 1 Music, on the other hand, foregrounds iconic, associative, and aesthetic meanings conveyed via an immediate form of meaning (cf.Reybrouck 2016Reybrouck , 2017 for analyses of immediacy in music cognition). 2 Both music and language employ symbols and motifs that rely on foundational indexical and iconic forms of meaning, but language is something of a standard-bearer for symbolic meaning, as music has become for the iconic.Despite the fact that there are numerous forms of music that communicate information (e.g.religious music or instructive songs for children) and aesthetic forms of language (e.g. in poetry or theater), these roles remain: language primarily for communication and music primarily for expression.Our hope is that by considering the origin, forms, and diverse instances of music and language in both the human and non-human world, that we can place symbolic, indexical, and iconic forms of meaning on equal footing in terms of the depth of significance they can convey.The payoff for this work will be to clarify how expression and interpretation of different kinds of meaning are defined by cultural, semiotic, and ecological contexts.
While numerous introductions to and treatments of biosemiotics aspire to describe semiosis beyond language, language remains an understandably handy and useful analogical construct for describing forms of communication at numerous levels of biological organization.Our hope is to offer a remedy to some of the language-preference our field has identified in previous work on the subject (cf.(Barbieri, 2007;Kull, 2015).As Hoffmeyer (2008, p. 299) has observed, language is but "a special case of a more general biosemiosis."

Music Versus Language: A False Dichotomy
On the surface it seems easy to differentiate language and music when it comes from humans.Generally, language is meant to communicate information and music is meant to express emotion or aesthetic impressions.There are forms of language that have specifically aesthetic purposes and music that can communicate, and forms of both whose purposes are idiosyncratic and specific to a particular community of practice.The point is that language and music serve both communicative and aesthetic 1 Our use of the terminology of 'icons, indices, and symbols' as the components of the tripartite sign and forms of reference such as iconicity and indexicality comes from the biosemiotic interpretation of the Peircean triadic model made by Terrence Deacon (1997).Icons involve immediate, associative forms of meaning, indices involve referential forms, and symbols have meaning beyond their immediate context.For further discussion of the relevance of Peircean signs to biosemiotics, see Stjernfelt (2014).
2 Barring the recent invention (ca.1850) of the technological reproduction of sound (Cross & Proctor, 2014), music has always been played for specific audiences, with each performance offering an interplay between culturally-contextualized expression and audience-responsiveness.
purposes.Highly trained musicians and synesthetes (who need not have musical training), for instance, are two groups that can grasp far more content in music than those without musical experience or training (Bragança et al., 2015).Considering language as either purely formal like mathematics or aesthetic like music brushes up against the classic question of code duality -the irreducible concomitant analog and algorithmic digital components accompanying all semiosis (Hoffmeyer & Emmeche, 1991).Our complaint is that there is an historical trend to privilege the symbolic over the indexical, and the indexical over the iconic, 3 as superior forms of conveyance, which has led to an overemphasis on the exclusive benefits of language and underemphasis on the significance of music and musicality in semiotics (for just a recent example, see Paolucci, 2021). 4 Present understandings of language coalesce around convictions that it is hierarchical and modular, starting from phonetics, through syntax, semantics, and pragmatics; thus it is a convenient model case for talking about more abstract symbolic capacities such as cognition and behavior.Language helps humans to describe our external and internal worlds and construct a cohesive whole, such that language is elevated to a kind of axiom of mind and experience.One way of describing this discourse is linguistic bias, due to our current dominant anthropic communication style, where the more decontextualized a referent can be, the more flexibility it has, without regard to the concomitant loss in communicative fidelity such a deliberately atonal move brings.This split between expression and content erroneously assumes that one element can exist without the other, and that what is commonly glossed as 'content' is superior. 5Expression, therefore, is often misunderstood as a dramatization of feeling, when this is only one of its aspects.We, following Price (Price et al., 2013), hone in on expression as signifying being moved to act based on one's response to a change in state, internal or external.
In order to re-discover the iconic and aesthetic aspects present in all modes of communication and expression, we analyze acoustic communication in its myriad forms through a musical lens. 6To put it more simply, we want to call any and all forms of acoustic expression 'music,' 7 in the way that a zoomusicologist would.
3 Again, relying on the Peircean triadic sign, where symbolic meaning is the most abstracted and depends, hierarchically, on indexical (referential) meaning which in turn depends on iconic (associative) meaning (cf.Peirce, 1991). 4Such "denied dependency on a subordinated other" in the words of Val Plumwood (1993, p. 41), relates here as well as to other pairs where one aspect becomes dominating rather than complimentary or in partnership.Compare with McGilchrist (2009) and Eisler & Fry (2019). 5This reiterates the perennial opposition in western thought between philosophy (discourse, truth) and rhetoric (style, pathos, the ability to persuade). 6There are a few related conversations concerning communication that blends features of both language and music.First, concerning motherese, a form of speech which utilizes emotional and prosodic attributes meant to engage infants' (as well as domestic animals') attention (Nikolsky, 2020;Parlato-Oliveira et al., 2021;Xiao et al., 2022).A second frequently discussed concept is musilanguage, the hypothesis that language and music share a common expressive and communicative ancestor in human evolution (Brown, 2001). 7It is important to note that while all sonic expression (made by a human or animal) could be classified as music, it doesn't need to be.A musical lens can be useful, but is not required for understanding all kinds of vocalizations.Dario Martinelli (2010, p. 85), for example, describes zoomusicology as the study of "the aesthetic use of sound communication among animals." 8His usage of "sound communication" may sound like a wiggle-word, not wanting to call it language, but not wanting to relegate music as merely expressionist.While we see the pragmatism and strategy of such a move -addressing the classic open question of whether absolute music (unaccompanied by text or program) represents or expresses extra-musical content -this implies a separation of aesthetic elements and semantic ones (Boghossian, 2020).Music has no more ability to pin down a specific interpretation than plain language does.The difference, however, is the important question of how ambiguities are resolved.In ordinary language, one can ask, "what do you mean by that?"With music, however, we have no such luxury, as ambiguities in intention or interpretation cannot be so easily resolved.Instead, we have repetition and variation on themes, call and response, mimicry and silence.
Structures and processes (e.g.behaviors) are a feature of animal music.We could dance around the matter and call these 'acoustic utterances,' but such obfuscations would performatively contradict our claim that various forms of animal acoustic utterance and behavior can reasonably be classified as animal music -with the musical, denotative, and connotative elements inextricable in their synergistic effect.These are utterances that may contain musical qualities for the animals themselves, and in those musical qualities, we can see aspects of semiosis that would be lost or impoverished without them.In this discussion we err on the side of behavioral, structural, and processual accounts, where expressive and communicative pragmatics are sufficiently universal that we can use specific instances of musical behavior to describe musical behavior in general (Marchesini & Celentano, 2021;Martinelli, 2005Martinelli, , 2009)).
Accommodating animal musicality as the null hypothesis to be defended against rather than as an impositional structure to be otherwise accounted for allows recuperation of lost meanings, while of course introducing the danger of overdetermining utterances as music, linguistic, or meaningful, when they may be mere non-intentional expressions.Yet, discussion of intentionality already bifurcates semiosis despite the fact that whether an act is intentional or not, it has an effect in the world via communicative behavior (Mitchell, 1991).It effects a difference that makes a difference.This more expansive and permissive conception of musicality does not discriminate between intentional musicality and non-intentional musicality if the overall synesthetic effect is deepened/heightened/made more precise by the incorporation of musical elements.This lands us in an expressivist model of communication in which no 8 The enterprise to understand what animal music is, is related to a central question in anthropomusicology, which hold that musical universals exist (Martinelli, 2007(Martinelli, , 2009)).Ethnomusicologists have identified two main possibilities for the question of musical universals: either there are musical traits present in all communities with no contrary examples, or there's something at the pragmatic level about musical practice that is common to all communities.The question of whether music is universal among humans is less relevant for our purposes, though we are perhaps more sympathetic to the idea that the pragmatics of music (namely, establishing common ground, and expressing and communicating through repetition and variation) are sufficient universals.
utterance, or modulation of rhythm, frequency, or tone is for naught. 9Instead, these parameters are ripe with affective, pictorial, and propulsive immanency.And they are not devoid of proposition or argument (Rothenberg, 2006(Rothenberg, , 2010)).We can choose to resist the sheer illocutionary force of an utterance, but that doesn't mean that it bears no meaning for the agent or other audiences, intended and unintended. 10 Thus, our purpose here is to explore nonhuman forms of musical expression first and work our way back to humans.By decentering our model focused on nonhuman music, we hope to find musical features of communication and expression that can more generally help us understand how meaning arises in interactions, and the various parameters organisms have at their disposal to generate and convey meaning.Following Honing et al.'s (Honing et al., 2015, p. 3) proposal for a "multicomponent perspective" to interpret the musical dimensions of semiosis, we agree that musical abilities (both expressive and perceptive) are underlying adaptations, not exaptations.
We present a model of semiosonic meaning-making, considering examples of 'music' from numerous sources, including the plant (Gagliano et al., 2012(Gagliano et al., , 2017) ) and bacteria world (Matsuhashi et al., 1998;Reguera, 2011;Sarvaiya & Kothari, 2015) as well as the more studied world of animal music.We will argue which qualities render such activity musical and parse unambiguous instances of musicality in communication among animals from different species.We will use this frame to make an anthropological case for how human language lost many qualities characterized by iconicity and indexicality, and then discuss how our conception of biosemiotic music, broadly conceived, can help rescue these features, leading to a more complete picture of environmentally-embedded intra-and inter-species biosemiosis.

The Case of Alarm Calls
Let's consider a concrete example: alarm calls.Many species of monkeys, for example, make calls to communicate to conspecifics that there is danger (Zuberbühler, 2009).Other animals may overhear or eavesdrop on these calls to learn information useful to them (Hauser, 1988), a phenomenon that has been observed in numerous species as well as in both wild and captive environments (Bílá et al., 2017; Matzinger   9 While of course some features of utterances are accidental -artifacts of the process and physics of conveying an expression rather than intended -these are misfires.Looking into how to triangulate semiosis so as not to get derailed by reading too much into these misfires, or semiotic red herrings, is an important aspect of good semiology.But assuming that all musicality is somehow added-on rather than fundamental is erring too far in the other logocentric direction.Study of what sort of environmental and social elements cause more or less misfires in communication or speech ("distortions") is indeed a very important part of biosemiotics, at the intersection with social design and the environmental/social/commercial determinants of health (Dowling et al., 2012;Potvin et al., 2011).Human industrial interference with natural processes lowers the fidelity of nonhuman communication (Szymkowiak & Schmidt, 2022).For example, the fact that songbirds sing louder in noise-polluted urban environments, and that that loudness causes more distortions (less fidelity in interpretation from other intended listening conspecifics), should be a cause for alarm, and is an example of semiocide via humans taking up too much sonic bandwidth (Luther et al., 2016). 10In fact, our training to resist the relevance of certain synesthetic elements of speech may render our understanding and fidelity poorer.Perhaps our lopsided focus on symbolic content broadsides us to other intuitive elements in speech which would tell us about the metastructure of discourse, power, and our willingness and desire to engage (or not) in certain milieus.& Fitch, 2021;Salmi et al., 2022).Yes, one function of an alarm call is to communicate vital information that can be acted upon (qua digital component); but these calls are also an excellent example of how musicality can feature in what appears to be a (quasi-)linguistic act (qua analog component).The qualities of an alarm call beyond its reference to danger might include urgency or fear, or even something more basic like a strong urge or need to make that call (an 'expression').What is it like to be the vocalizer in that environment, or to hear that vocalization?There we might find qualitative, affective, or even aesthetic experience, where the category of 'music' can help us clarify perhaps underappreciated aspects of the meaning-making going on. 11o put it more directly, music conveys contextual aboutness.The idea that music is a language of emotion is one instance of this quality, but still only one piece of a larger story.An alarm call is danger to those who hear it: the call is iconic of that danger in its onomatopoeisis.There's an immediate recognition and reaction by tuned-in others of what the utterer is experiencing.
Music is immediate because iconicity (which is the form of meaning most prominent in music) is immediate -an immediate aboutness that connects an organism's experienced environment, its body, and those hearing these acoustic behaviors.We can think of aesthetic musical properties of communication as a synesthetic form of metaphor.Based on the "the affective quality of all iconic relations according to Peircian abduction, rhemic icons (qualisigns) cannot escape their immediacy" (Petrilli & Ji, 2022); though compare with Nöth (2014), who in a logocentric context focusing on digitality, claims to the contrary that "[i]t is logically impossible for a rhematic sign to be also informative."As John Collier (2013) once phrased it, a qualisign "has an iconic relation to its object (itself) and a rhemic relation to its interpretant (itself).A qualisign is an iconic rheme."In non-virtualized media, the immediacy of the iconic can involve forms of synesthetic musicality, and thus include affective dimensions which always accompany such signs according to their analog component.
The immediateness and aboutness of musical meaning can be seen in human and non-human primates where there is a direct relationship between embodiment and acoustic expression.Pouw et al. demonstrated that human vocalizations contain information about bodily states (such as the amount of muscle tension during upper limb movements) that are detectable by listeners who hear the vocalizations but cannot see the source, so participants were able to synchronize their arm movements with those of the speaker when they could not see the speaker's movements (Pouw et al., 2020).These findings mirror those in non-human primates.For example, rhesus monkeys can differentiate age-related body size based on the acoustic qualities of vocalizations (Ghazanfar et al., 2007).Orangutans exploit this sonic phenomenon to mislead others, cupping their mouths with their hands so they sound larger and more threatening (Pisanski et al., 2016).The aesthetic dimensions of the call (e.g., timbre, tone, frequency, rhythm) provide a suite of situational clues that contextualize any 'content,' without which, misunderstanding and misinterpretation would increase.
It's worth pointing out that 'alarms' can take many forms.There are many examples that challenge the idea of what a sensible danger signal can be.The embryos of the yellow-legged gull, still developing inside eggs, respond to adult alarm calls by vibrating within their shell and transmitting the warning to their clutchmates (Noguera & Velando, 2019).Moving beyond the animal kingdom, tomato and tobacco plants emit ultrasonic sounds when stressed by lack of water or if their stem is cut (Khait et al., 2019;Zweifel & Zeugin, 2008).Rubber trees become more productive when bombarded with ultrasonic waves on their tapping surface (Zhu et al., 2013).It is not possible to infer intention on the part of plants, but both cases are undeniably ways in which plants produce and react to sonic expressions in their environments (Gagliano et al., 2012).
Pauses or breaks in background acoustic signaling can be informative as well.Gray squirrels have been observed to act normally when they can hear bird chatter, yet stop and hide when the chatter stops.Bird chatter acts as a reassuring and indicative background sound; researchers have described it as the 'Muzak' of the animal kingdom, of which the squirrels are always peripherally aware (Lilly et al., 2019).Similarly, the crackling and whooshing sounds of a healthy coral reef promotes community development in fish populations whereas the sound of a damaged coral reef suppresses it (Gordon et al., 2019).Many species of fish appear to derive meaning from the acoustic environment about the suitability of a particular location for food and shelter.
These semiosonic phenomena emerge not just from particular, solitary organisms, but webs of resonance and responding between biota (i.e.living organisms) and their abiotic media (i.e.physical environments).In fact, new developments in microphone and sound isolation technology can use these precise acoustic measurements to distinguish between restored vs. degraded forests.This ecoacoustic approach can record the sounds of meso-and macrofauna which index numerous microhabitat acoustic features of soil biota health, such as a greater ratio of high-to low-frequency sounds and acoustic diversity.The fact that different soil acoustic ecologies correspond to divergent soil ecosystem health is a promising approach to understand and more easily detect ecological perturbations (Robinson et al., 2023).
Auditory sensing is often tapped into by species from various kingdoms to metacommunicate and relate harmonically -in the evolutionary theater in which all analytically identifiable semiosis occurs.It doesn't require a long conceptual leap to understand that musical valence -whether the organism is perceiving a positive, safe, welcoming situation or a negative, dangerous, threatening situation -is an essential part of the acoustic information organisms can perceive.While awareness of this information may not be consciousness, the resonant bodies of living beings always already flicker in entrainment in one way or another with the background biophysics of resonance and its meta-semiotic organization.There is evidence that signaling and recognition systems evolve asymmetrically due to the importance of being able to monitor recently diverged species that may still pose a threat to territory, which can in turn affect mating success.
Perhaps it is evident that these examples show how musical features like iconicity, embodiment, and valence operate at sub-conscious levels in the sonic communicative expressions that indicate the presence or lack of danger, health or decay; but why bother calling these behaviors music?Is such a term a mere over-extension of the concept, past the point of usability?Or, is there really something to be gained by framing such sounds as music?As we've argued, musicality helps us to emphasize the depth and effect of iconicity present in all expression and communication, as well as the continuity and overlaying of simultaneous and displaced patterns (Nomura et al., 2018).The immediacy and inviolability of iconic communication means that regardless of the other interpretations which other con-and interspecifics may perceive in their overlapping Umwelten (i.e. each organism's perceived environment (Von Uexküll [1934] 1992)) and translations, there remains a mediating, moderating reverberation which physically agitates any being or medium within 'earshot' that is equipped with a body -biotic or abiotic -which can resonate with the sonic emission.The general tone or mood (safety or danger), intensity of that communication (mild versus severe), and technical acoustic ecological supra-compositional elements of rhythm, pitch, frequency, and resonance will be picked up differentially for different sensory configurations; but for the right interpreters, these signs communicate clear environmental cues to conspecifics and often interspecifics too (including other animals, other fish, other plants, etc.).The particular sonic expressions impart immediate sensations offering multifold meaning accessible for those with the disposition to hear and feel them.

Language and Music Overlapping in Humans
Just as we claim that the iconicity of nonhuman music provides a full palate of communicative needs without added semantic specificity, turning to human music we now look at how in strictly codified musical cultures, human music's symbolic repertoire can serve the purpose of language's semantic specificity.
A commonly cited example from human culture that evinces the blurred boundary between language and music is the talking drums of the Yoruba people.There has been great anthropological interest in the use of talking drums for long-distance communication as speech surrogates, sometimes across or down rivers and their roar with which vocal speech would encounter sonic interference patterns.While the syntactical and semantic use of drums is not a comprehensive picture of the use of the drums in Yoruba culture, it is easy to see why there is so much interest (Durojaye et al., 2021).On the surface, it is a long-distance communication system that uses elements of both language and music.Speakers of tonal languages like Yoruban use sequences of two notes played on pitched drums in order to transmit information.Calls and responses are deliberately chosen to minimize miscommunication on matters of potential great importance.Repetition is key when receivers doubt the precision of the original message.Despite their perlocutionary content, they do not lose their musicality, as one would expect, as if some sort of zero-sum game of mutual exclusivity were at play.Indeed, the messages contain both linguistic and musical elements, and in so doing constitute a robust communication system.Symbolic and iconic content here serve to reinforce each other, and convey the intended message more clearly than if one or the other communication technique were used on its own.Yoruba drumming is also used to communicate with deities in spiritual practice and for artistic purposes (Omojola 2010).Symbolic content, aesthetics, and emotion blend together in a palpable way.The talking drums can communicate content that is specific and concrete like the amount of some product for trade.The drums can also be used for metaphorical purposes, similar to using an aphoristic phrase to refer to something, either as a short-hand or for expressive or artistic purposes.In this way, the combination of linguistic and musical features provides a communication system with associations that can be both referential, as part of a codified system, and expressive, due to the immediate associations hearers have to the musical features.
Another example looks at the Indian classical music system of notation and correspondence between words and musical sounds.Svara (swara) in Sanskrit connotes a specific breath, vowel, and corresponding musical note.This ancient Indian concept of musical pitch is thoroughly symbolic, so much so, that melodies become words, and poetry can be expressed instrumentally (Datta et al., 2017).Poetry, of Tagore for example, read in diverse contexts must be reinterpreted, and often are instrumentally (without the lyrics) interpreting a poem for the present location (Desha), circumstances (Kaala), and impetus that triggered the emotion eliciting the poem (Karana).
In cultures where music and language are intertwined, melodies can convey to these seasoned listeners lines of well-known poetry that can be back-translated into words, similarly to how the Yoruban drum calls carry precise semantic content.
It is a common assumption that language is informative and music is emotional; but this view is incomplete (Damasio, 1994).It also tends to underestimate the meaningful dimensions of musicality and emotion (Nussbaum & Schweinberger, 2021).Of course emotion is a central component of music, but music contains much more.Music requires recognition of embodiment as well as associations given by historical, cultural consensus.It cannot be ungrounded from its referent (except, perhaps, in musical traditions where such ungrounding is an explicit goal, such as experimental music).In fact, musicality and emotion are both fundamental components of the meaning-making taking place in all kinds of human interaction.The aesthetics, emotion, and history of an expressive utterance or action have as much significance as music's referential meaning, and recalling examples like the talking drums and Indian classical music can help clarify the many facets at play.
Music also is malleable for different functions (e.g.performance, expression, aesthetics); and not all music has all functions.Different musical instantiations and purposes are explored in various cultures, and exist in forms of communication and expression that might not necessarily even be called music, despite their involving acoustic and aesthetic choices.In a way, we are posing the question of whether something having musical qualities makes it music.Is bird song musical but not music?
The utility for such a distinction is hard to see.The expressivist model of communication takes both music and language to be conveying similar intentions and distinct meanings -the modes or methods are just accomplishing this according to differing degrees of logocentric formality, which changes the metanarrative under which each form of understanding operates.

Felicity of Utterances and Umwelten
If, including language and music, all forms of semiosis are utilitarian in non-singular ways --meaning that the composite semiosis is greater than any particular digital or analog component -then it behooves us to stop ignoring certain aspects of semiosis as superfluous extras or nonreactive backgrounds.Achieving higher-fidelity semiosis (ecologically, biologically, and culturally) requires tuning into a full spectrum approach, rather than settling for certain narrow bandwidths, even if the latter do provide exquisite depth.Perhaps there is a zero-sum game of awareness.But then, we should at least check-in once in a while to see if the findings of our narrow focus correlate with the other extant forms and instantiations that are sidelined in order to concentrate on particular details.Periodic matching of intensive and extensive scientific study is crucial to knit together the dispersed disciplines into a reflective equilibrium.Otherwise, we risk entering the hall of mirrors of ungrounded symbolic communication which Terrence Deacon (2011), Iain McGilchrist (2009), and others have identified and warned against.
In the transition to industrialization and urbanization, the relevant signal for humans changed from ecological sounds (e.g.biophony, the sounds of living things and geophony, the sounds of the non-living environment) to an increased focus on anthrophony (the sounds of people) and mechaphony (the sounds of machines) (Hendlin, 2020;Krause, 2015;Truax, 1978)).This figure-ground shift between what were the relevant things to pay attention to also changed how to communicate about them.When resonance with the environment became less important than communicating specific plans, orders, and other directives and coordination information amongst humans only (mainly speaking the same language), the exigency of the communication superseded the aesthetics of the transmission, rendering the musical elements in human speech less salient.
Attending to the musicality of language and other modes of semiosis that occurs between different organisms not only helps overcome the digital-centrism of 20th century positivist linguistics, but also permits anchoring semiosis in the analog experiences of joy and pleasure.Kalevi Kull (2022) describes beauty as the perfect semiotic fitting.The joining of beauty with precision is crucial to overcome prejudices against ecological harmony; as if attending to the needs, demands, pleas, and lives of others somehow reduced our own happiness or fitness, properly understood.Multirelational fitting with other aspects of one's Umwelt suggests that the aesthetic dimensions of speech (Kull, 2022, p. 12) -drastically reduced in contemporary speech in most cultures -provide far more in terms of entrainment towards comprehension and mood attunement than we have assumed.Attending to this invisible work, the latent musicality occurring in the background of what we take to be the main attraction of semiosis, opens our aperture of awareness to a wider range of factors and signals both endo-and exosemiotically, enabling us to more fully inhabit our bodies and the places and structurings that constitute us.
Studies suggest that musical training not only potentiates domain specific abilities (e.g.verbal memory, reasoning, visuospatial cognition, divergent thinking, etc.) associated with working memory, but also benefits domain general areas such as phonological memory and executive function (for a review see Ramachandra et al., 2011).Yet, with the shift to text-based interfaces of language, especially in the 20th century, much of this musicality of language was lost.Especially in translation of texts, musicality is often viewed as "the most recalcitrant of all features in a sourcelanguage text" (Wong, 2006, p. 91), while semantic content can be preserved.This discrepancy between the transferability of semantic content from aural to written form and the difficulty of preserving musicality is symptomatic of the presumption that semantic content conveys more than musicality, that it is capable of conveying more information than musicality.
But in our current digital age dominated by short videos, often fielded by the inventiveness of youth, the 21st century may witness a shift from semantic to musical features becoming forefront in human semiosis.Short-form TikTok videos and the repetitive, theme-and-variation riffing off each other (remixing), pays far more attention to the aesthetic dimensions of communication, including the pleasurable or strange impressions of semiosis.Unexpected and attention-getting features become increasingly salient communication prominances in a saturated environment.The study of human semiosis needs to expand and adapt to account for the variety of forms of human behavior and expression, and foregrounding music is one handy way to side-step potentially limiting assumptions.
Mark Reybrouck is one scholar whose work is focused on reconceptualizing music cognition in terms of "ecosemiotics," meaning that rather than looking at music as a static entity, Reybrouck (2012Reybrouck ( , 2015) ) instead views music as a process that occurs within an environmental context.Such a model of music meaning and perception, based in an enactive and embodied cognition framework, foregrounds the relationship between perceiver and environment as well as the immediacy of musical meaning within a broader neurophenomenological framework (Reybrouck, 2021;Reybrouck et al., 2021;Reybrouck & Podlipniak, 2019).Specifically, listeners have a relationship with their sonic environments that is based on function.All humans (and all organisms) evolved some kind of functional relationship with our environments.12Jakob von Uexkull first proposed a model for "perceptions, communications, and purposeful behaviors" in trying to account for the experience of non-human animals (Uexküll, 2010, p. 3).All animals (humans included) live in a perceptual environment which is significant to lives and needs.The perceiver is in a constant state of interaction and feedback with their perceptual environment, which is an idea that is central to many of the 20th century cybernetic theories that came later.Particularly important for our purposes is the idea that we only perceive what is useful or meaningful to us in our "evolutionary-semiotic context" (Uexküll, 2010, p. 25).This Umwelt "can be considered as the sum total of [the] perceptual cues among the stimuli in [the] environment" (Reybrouck, 2015, p. 16).The environment, then, "is merely the projection or mapping out of the organism's internal organization onto the outside world" (Reybrouck, 2015, p. 6).
Drawing on James Gibson, Reybrouck provides a way of incorporating the potentially 'universal' capacities and tendencies in music.However, because of the closed feedback loop between individual and environment, these elements of music are not introduced as isolated traits to be explained. 13Rather, "senses, in this view, do not simply function to arouse sensations but pick up information, which is already structured and ordered as part of an organism-environment ecosystem" (Reybrouck, 2015, p. 15).The point is that organisms evolved to attend to certain features of the sonic environment, which automatically shapes the meanings they can perceive, but those meanings can't be reduced to the anatomy of the sensing organ or the waveform of the sound.These are indeed crucial components to meaning-making, but they operate together as scaffolding for the evolution of future meaning (c.f.Caporael et al. 2014).We are born and raised in a cultural environment that is created by other people.What's more, we don't just perceive sonic phenomena -we structure what we perceive (Reybrouck, 2012(Reybrouck, , 2015)).We are active participants in the production of meaning, and music (including all iconic and aesthetic forms of signification) are an essential part of how physiology, behavior, and culture relate over evolutionary time.
Musicality finds expression in dialects of semiosis, not ideolects.The biosocial meaning of semiosis helps us distinguish between music and random tonal utterances.Musicality in semiosis provides many more surfaces (c.f."surfaces inside surfaces, " Hoffmeyer, 1998), reticulations, or convolutions, for semiosis to be transmitted, creating an affective field.What expressionism may lack in precision and the ability to 'force' one to a certain conclusion, it makes up for in resonancedeactivating presuppositions, and rearranging prejudgments to create space for novel thought and action.

Conclusion
Becoming more aware how musicality informs our own semiosis, we can attend more deliberately to the musical qualities of nonhuman biosemiotics.Paying more attention to soundscapes as cohesive structures also temper mechaphony and other intrusive forms of anthrophony.Semiosonic research gives us deeper insights into harmonious and disharmonious sounds and noises, which can provide heuristics for ecosystem and organism health.Attending to our influences --say, distorting birdsong or other aural communication by our nonhuman cohabitants of a given territory -can also provide motivation to walk back the loudness which has come to represent our age (Wykes 2021).Perhaps, in a quieter world, our own musicality can enjoy the whisper or sotto voce as ways of gathering and conveying our own thoughts.Such dynamics may introduce new modes of thought that show our current linguistic and psychoacoustic paradigm to be but one frame of reference among others, each with its own insights that help contextualize the rest.
Biosemiotics as an enterprise seeks to account for the meaning-making occurring in biological systems, and the truly difficult work of making these sets of models as all-encompassing as possible can perhaps be facilitated by tuning into the musicality inherent in semiosis (Schafer, 1977).Music and language stand as overlapping yet opposed modalities in human expression, and find a wide range of instantiations throughout the natural world.It may be that considering both modalities on equal footing can facilitate the extension of semiosis by recovering the icon from among the foregrounded index and pushing on the limits of what our conceptualization of a symbol can be.