Exploring Music and Meaning Across Cultures at the SUAD Salon de Musique

We recently had the pleasure and privilege of participating in a SUAD Salon de Musique, titled Semiotics of Music – How Music Makes Meaning Across Cultures organized by our library with support of our colleagues, particularly Abdelaziz Galal. Representing MCM and SUAD’s Centre for the Anthropology of World Cultures (CAWC) were Ivana Beveridge and MCM master students Shuwei Chen, Sofiia Chernikova and Caio Carreira Martins.

What began as a musical gathering unfolded into an intellectual exploration that brought together diverse cultural perspectives in a shared inquiry into how music makes meaning.

From the outset, the intention was to move beyond listening and create a space for interpretation where music could be explored in relation to culture and context. Our students draw from Chinese, Russian, and Brazilian musical traditions and helped illustrate how music operates as a deeply embedded cultural system.

At MCM, in the tradition of CELSA, we place special emphasis on semiotic research across different fields and its application to communication, supported by a rich body of research by our professors including Dr. Karine Berthelot-Guiet and our colleagues at GRIPIC. Semiotics helps us understand how meaning is produced, interpreted, and negotiated beyond words, which makes it relevant for fields such as media, marketing, and cultural studies.

Music offers one of the most compelling illustrations of this. As a nonverbal language, it communicates through rhythm, timbre, silence, and repetition. Yet music is not simply “organized sound.” It is a semiotic system in which sound becomes signification shaped by structure, context, function, reception, and shared cultural codes. Studying music as a semiotic system and an agent of culture allows us to see how sound becomes language, one that is not spoken but still deeply expressive and socially meaningful.

From Sound to Signification

As we spoke with colleagues, we kept going back to two central questions: if music is ephemeral, how can we understand it as a system of meaning? Also, how does music produce meaning without words? From the semiotic perspective, meaning does not reside within the sound itself, but emerges through interaction between the music, context, listener, and learned cultural frameworks. The same melody can evoke mourning in one context, spirituality in another, or cinematic drama elsewhere. Meaning is not fixed; it is relational and situated.

This perspective draws on a rich semiotic tradition. From Saussure’s understanding of meaning as relational within systems of signs, to Peirce’s triadic model of sign, object, and interpretant, we see that musical sounds can function as icons, indices, or symbols. Umberto Eco reminds us that meaning depends on shared cultural codes, while Roland Barthes shows how music participates in broader ideological narratives transforming genres into cultural myths and denotation to connotation. Greimas further reveals how meaning emerges through contrast: tension and resolution, familiarity and novelty, order and ambiguity.

These frameworks help us distinguish between musicology and semiotics. Where music theory asks how music is structured, semiotics asks how it becomes meaningful and how listeners interpret it. We do not “decode” music as we would language - we navigate its interpretive field, reconciling tensions and possibilities.

Between Anthropology and Cognitive Science

Our exploration zigzagged from anthropology to cognitive science. From Claude Lévi-Strauss’s parallels between music and myth, to contemporary fMRI investigation of the cultural specificity of music memory, we examined how music operates both as a cultural construct and a cognitive experience. While some associations such as those linked to dance, ritual, or healing appear to be nearly universal, much of musical meaning depends on cultural familiarity. The brain, in turn, processes familiar and unfamiliar music differently, highlighting the role of learned systems in interpretation.

The cultural examples shared by our students brought these ideas vividly to life. The Chinese guqin, with its symbolic system of heaven, earth, and humanity embedded in its structure, demonstrated how meaning can precede melody. Mongolian throat singing where singers produce two or three pitches simultaneously illustrated Peirce’s notion of iconic signs, imitating natural sounds in ways that remain intuitively perceptible even across cultures, and UNESCO recognized Dong polyphonic singing showed how music functions as social memory, identity construction, oral archive, and communal storytelling.

Russian bell ringing revealed how sound can carry spiritual, social, and historical significance, functioning as both the “voice of God” and the “voice of the people,” and choir performances illustrated how modern music can absorb traditional symbols. Brazilian music examples offered another dimension, where meaning emerges through metaphor and rhythm, to address social issues, labor alienation or dehumanization under modern urban systems, as well as issues of identity as performative signs. These works showed how music can simultaneously resist fixed interpretation and generate powerful shared meanings through poetic abstraction, social critique, or performative expressions of cultural hybridity,

Across these examples, one idea remained constant: music is a dynamic site of meaning-making. It is shaped by tensions between expectation and deviation, structure and ambiguity, universality and specificity. It is both deeply personal and profoundly social.

As Jean-Jacques Boutaud reminds us, communication is a “permanent theater of signs.” In this sense, music is not an exception to communication but one of its most expressive forms. The SUAD Salon de Musique offers more than a discussion - it created a space where sound became a pathway into culture, identity, and meaning.