"Tuning In": Resonance, Rhythm, Harmony as Icon, Index, Symbol, preliminary discussion on "Book II"

In this 9 min video, Cary Campbell introduces the conceptual framework that informs "Book II: Musicking" of the 3-part workbook series "Tuning in, a new theory of sound, music, & instruments". (see: thegrouplegrou...)
The musical taskscape can be conceptualized through three basic semiotic elements, which constitute different kinds of musicking relationships: Resonance (connected with the perception of aboutness, shared form or likeness (iconicity); Rhythm (connected with the perception of direct physical/contiguous associations, the location of the icon in time and space); and Harmony (connected with social habit-formation).
o Resonance (associated with the perception of iconicity);
Resonance is the root of all musicking and sounding relationships and is associated with the most fundamental kind of sign relationship: the icon. Tuning into a sounding environment always implies forms and modes of resonance, which involve the recognition or association of similarity and shared likeness.
o Rhythm (associated with the perception of indexicality);
The perception of resonance always implies association and interaction between some resonant being with some resonant object, cycle or acoustic-surround. Thus resonance, as a mode of musicking, implies entrainment, which can be understood generally as the process by which one system becomes physically-temporally synchronized and coordinated with another. This entrainment is associated with the organism’s perception of indexical relationships in the sounding environment, (an index being a sign that signifies its object based on being directly, physically or contiguously connected with it).
These indexical-sound relationships are varied in nature, ranging from the kind of gravitational (indexical) pull of tonality inherent in musical modes or scales (perceived as organized relationships arising from notes of the harmonic series) to the perception of ordered-time or rhythm itself, including feelings of rhythmic dissonance, consonance and cadence, such as perceived/felt in polyrhythmic music. Ultimately, such indexical cognition has to do with the way sound is perceived across a spectrum from ‘click’ to ‘sustain’ and how the organism entrains with temporal-cyclical relationships with properties of ‘sounding events’, such as the perception of overtones and the acoustic signatures of objects and organisms (see *Soundmarks and *Keynote Sounds) that become associated (indexically) with different resonators and sounding objects/beings.
o Harmony (associated with the perception of symbols);
When resonance (aboutness/icon) is perceived and associated in time/space in terms of rhythmic cycles and entrainments, emergent (virtual, harmonic) patternings weigh on the present-musicking as an adjacent space of possibility and anticipation.
Importantly, and unlike resonance and rhythm, harmonic musicking relationships represent certain habitualised and conventionalized paths in musicking, which again we refer to as scaffoldings or *scaffolding structures, preserving the memory of past learning and path-dependencies).
In short, Harmony is symbolic in the sense that harmonic possibilities are not actual, embodied and instantiated, resonating (iconic) or rhythmic (indexical) relationships, but rather represent the virtual projectioning OF HABITUAL PATTERNS and interpretive dispositions on the unfolding and resonating musical taskscape: “The reality of symbols is not the reality of embodied signs; it is the reality of signs in their possibilities of embodiment” (CS. Peirce).
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Video recorded and produced by Thomas Hoeller @ Terrestrial Sound Studio, in East Van (Summer, 2024).

[@oceaanpendharkar1668]

Interesting! As someone coming at this with not a lot of background in semiotics, I'm curious why you've chosen harmony and not rhythm as associated with "symbol". It seems to me like most of what you said about harmony in this video could also be said about rhythm. It could just be that I'm not totally grasping what you're getting at, though.

[@carycampbelltrio5181]

Thanks for the super thoughtful question. I hear ya ... in many ways these semiotic terms are famously slippery. I also agree that the entraining, rhythmic relationships we are describing as indexical have a kind of emergent patterning that organism's tune into. These indexical relationships can gradually become increasingly systematized, hierarchic and self-referential (like the pull of tonality inherent to modes/scales/ragas) and Gary Tomlinson likes to describe this as a kind of hyper-indexicality -- not yet full-fledged, symbolic cognition, but on the way towards it.
The difference is that though these kinds of musical competencies may be represent a higher-order of indexicality, it is still tethered to the sounding-environment, and not yet fully virtual/symbolic. Again, a symbol is a sign that signifies its object based on habitual social-convention -- not likeness/shared-form like the icon; and not by being directly connected in time/space like the index.
Thanks for getting the conversation going! ✌