Love-making and music-making seem to me to have the capacity to transcend signalling. We can get lost in sex and song, pulled out of our usual patterns of broadcasting and receiving, taken up into something altogether free and fresh.

Of course, sex and song are also deeply interwoven with signals, and plenty of people mimic rather than make love and music; but that is over there, and over here—in the moment of rapturous love- or music-making—those things fall away, mostly, and for a time.