1 Music as Social Phenomena: A Relational Model
Music moves us. It brings tears, delight, energy, or calm. But what exactly is it that moves us? This series offers a model of music grounded in relational ontology — one that begins not with what music means, but with what music does.
Music as Material and Social
Music is not a message. It is not a symbolic system that encodes and transmits meaning between minds. Rather, it is a material phenomenon — a pattern of sound — that functions socially by activating values in others. A music maker generates sound, and that sound has the potential to resonate within a listener’s consciousness, selecting from that listener’s system of perceptual categorisations and affective dispositions.
In these terms, music is not semiotic, because it does not rely on the symbolic abstraction of meaning. But it is social, because it acts upon systems of value within social bodies — like laughter, birdsong, or the colours of a peacock’s tail.
Relational Ontology: Sound in Context
In the model developed here, we take seriously the implications of a relational ontology: nothing exists in isolation, and no phenomenon is defined independently of the relations in which it participates. Sounds are not just events in physical space. They are phenomena — not in the sense of universal percepts, but as instances of potential actualised in and through relations. These relations include the listener’s body, memory, attention, and social and cultural context.
Time, too, is understood relationally: not as a container or a measure, but as the unfolding of processes. Sound unfolds in time, and so does consciousness. Music arises when these unfoldings come into resonance — when the movement of sound selects a movement of value in the listener.
Music Maker and Music Listener
A key distinction in this model is between the music maker and the music listener.
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The music maker instantiates material potential: sound patterns in time.
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The music listener actualises value: a response of feeling, attention, and perhaps memory.
This is not a communication between minds, but an encounter between phenomena and consciousness. The social function of music lies in its power to recruit shared systems of value — just as the scent of ripened fruit might draw animals, or a ritual chant might synchronise a group.
From Sound to Social Force
This approach allows us to understand music not as a symbolic message to be interpreted, but as a social force that acts through its capacity to resonate. A piece of music can stir a crowd, offer solace, coordinate movement, or bind people together. But it does this not by conveying meanings, but by selecting and activating values in those who listen.
This distinction is crucial. The value awakened in the listener is not put there by the music. Rather, the music selects it from a system already formed through embodied experience and social life.
In Part 2, we will turn more closely to the materiality of sound itself — how physical patterns of vibration participate in the unfolding of processes, and how these are taken up within the body of the listener.
2 The Sound of Process: Materiality, Time, and Resonance
If music is not a symbolic message but a material phenomenon that functions socially, then what kind of material phenomenon is it? What kind of matter is sound? And how does this matter come to matter — how does it exert social force?
To answer these questions, we turn to sound as processual materiality: something that unfolds through time and in relation.
Sound as Unfolding
In a relational ontology, time is not a container in which things happen. Time is the unfolding of processes. A sound does not occur in time; it is time — the time of its unfolding. This makes sound a particularly vivid example of what it means for a phenomenon to exist as relation.
A single tone is not an object but a movement of air. A rhythm is not a set of points in time but a patterned trajectory. Harmony, timbre, phrasing — all are forms of unfolding, inseparable from the processes that actualise them in material and perceptual space.
When we say that music “unfolds in time,” we are describing a relational process: sound and consciousness co-arising, each affecting the other.
From Vibration to Value
Sound begins as vibration — compressions and rarefactions of air. But its social function begins only when those vibrations are taken up in a body — when a listening body hears not only frequencies, but qualities. A sound is not merely detected; it is felt. This feeling is shaped by the body’s histories, habits, and perceptual structures — many of which are shared across individuals, cultures, or species.
This makes music a phenomenon that acts through resonance: the matching of movement in one domain (sound) with movement in another (consciousness). Resonance is not mere mimicry. It is relational selection: a process in which the unfolding of sound brings forth — activates — a corresponding unfolding of affect, attention, or action in the listener.
This is how music begins to function socially. Not through meaning, but through value: by selecting what matters from a body’s system of dispositions.
No Symbols, No Codes
There are no messages in music. There are no codes to be deciphered. What there is, instead, is a shared field of attunement. The listener is not interpreting the music; they are responding to it — through the actualisation of patterned affect.
This patterning does not require shared symbols, but it often recruits shared histories. A genre, a style, a groove — these are not semiotic systems, but sedimented forms of valueful relation. They shape what kinds of resonance are possible. They make social coordination and collective affect possible.
In Part 3, we explore how these shared resonances give rise to musical ecologies — distributed systems of sound, value, and social relation that link music makers and listeners in a common unfolding.
3 Shared Soundworlds: Musical Ecologies and Social Bodies
If music is a material phenomenon that functions socially by activating values in listeners, then its social power lies not in communication, but in co-ordination. Not in saying something, but in sounding with others.
In this post, we explore how music gives rise to musical ecologies — distributed networks of relations among bodies, sounds, values, and histories. These ecologies link music makers and music listeners in overlapping fields of attunement.
From Individual Bodies to Social Bodies
When a listener hears music, they are not merely decoding structure; they are enacting a bodily response to patterned sound. This response is shaped by evolutionary dispositions, cultural practices, and individual history — all of which reside not only in the brain, but in the whole body as a social, biological, and physical system.
Music resonates with this bodily system. But because bodies are never simply individual — they are born, shaped, and sustained through social relation — the affective resonance of music draws listeners into shared experience. When this happens, the body of the listener becomes part of a social body, even if no words are exchanged.
A crowd dancing, a choir singing, a mother humming to her child: these are not symbolic transactions. They are mutual enactments of patterned resonance — what we might call valueful synchrony.
Ecologies of Sound and Value
These resonant synchronies do not emerge from nowhere. They depend on shared conditions: cultural practices, acoustic environments, habits of attention, and historical repertoires of feeling. Together, these form musical ecologies — patterned arrangements of material and social potential that support the emergence of resonance.
Such ecologies are not reducible to music makers or music listeners. They are relational fields in which music happens — not as an object, but as an event of unfolding relation.
And they are never static. As music makers generate sound — instantiating particular material forms — and as listeners respond — actualising particular affective patterns — the ecology shifts. New resonances are formed, new values are selected. The ecology evolves.
Music as Social Force
Because music unfolds in relation, it can bring into being new social possibilities. It can recruit attention, shape collective movement, generate belonging, and mobilise affect. It does this not by representing a shared world, but by co-producing one — through the coordinated resonance of bodies in time.
In this sense, music does not describe a world. It instantiates one. It draws together music maker and music listener into a shared soundworld — a momentary, material, social constellation.
In Part 4, we explore how this resonance is not only social, but emotional — how music moves us by actualising affective potential in patterned and powerful ways.
4 Feeling With: Affective Resonance and Emotional Force
In previous posts, we described music as a material phenomenon that functions socially by activating values in listeners. This post turns to the affective dimension of that activation: how music feels.
We propose that music’s force lies not in what it means, but in what it moves — in how it resonates with affective patterns of value. Music does not represent emotion; it actualises emotional potential in patterned and relational ways.
The Feeling of Form
When a listener hears music, they encounter changes in pitch, rhythm, loudness, texture, and timbre. These are not just acoustic features; they are perceptual forces that the body registers as tensions, releases, intensities, and reliefs.
These patterned forces map onto — or better, activate — bodily capacities for feeling. Rising pitch may activate anticipatory tension. A sudden silence may evoke surprise. Repetition may comfort; dissonance may disturb. These effects are not symbolic. They are affective responses to material form.
But these responses are not fixed. They are shaped by cultural, developmental, and situational factors. The same sound may elicit different feelings in different contexts. Still, in all cases, the emotional response is actualised from the listener’s own affective potential, triggered by the form of the music, in relation.
Emotional Patterning Without Emotional Content
Music often feels expressive — joyful, mournful, agitated, serene. Yet music does not express these states in the way a person might verbally articulate emotion. It does not refer to emotion. Instead, it produces affective resonances that align with emotional experience.
This is an important distinction. Music does not contain emotion, nor does it communicate it from music maker to music listener. Rather, it brings about patterns of feeling that can be co-experienced across listeners. This shared resonance allows listeners to feel with others — even when listening alone.
In this sense, music’s emotional power lies in its capacity to coordinate affect across time and bodies — not to label or describe emotion, but to synchronise it.
Force Without Message
Music thus exerts emotional force without message. It does not need to “say” anything to move us. Its power lies in the dynamics of unfolding — of tension and release, repetition and variation, continuation and rupture — which our bodies experience as emotional events.
These affective dynamics unfold in time, not as a ticking clock, but as processual time: the lived time of shifting states and relational change. Music resonates with this temporality, drawing listeners into patterns of affective unfolding that are as much embodied as they are auditory.
In Part 5, we turn directly to the question of meaning. If music is so powerful, why does it not count as a semiotic system? What kind of significance does it carry, and how should we understand that significance in relation to meaning?
5 Significance Without Symbol: Why Music Isn’t a Language
Music is often said to be a “language,” or to “communicate,” or to “express meaning.” These metaphors are widespread and intuitively appealing — and yet, they can obscure more than they reveal. If we’re to understand how music functions in our relational model, we need to be precise: music is not a semiotic system. It does not create or convey meaning by symbolic means. Its power lies elsewhere.
In a semiotic system like language, meaning is structured paradigmatically. Speakers make choices from meaning systems — for instance, choosing the word cat instead of dog, or jump instead of crawl — and those choices are what make the expression meaningful. The paradigmatic axis is central to how meaning is organised and interpreted: the value of any given word depends on the range of alternatives that could have been chosen instead.
In music, there are certainly choices — choices of pitch, rhythm, timbre, tempo, texture, and more. These are often richly structured, both culturally and historically. But they are not choices in meaning. They are not symbolic selections that stand in opposition to other meanings. Rather, they are material selections: choices of sound, not choices of signification. A composer might choose to resolve a phrase with a major triad rather than a suspended fourth, but that choice does not produce a different meaning in the linguistic sense — it produces a different sonic effect that will resonate differently with listeners.
This is an important distinction. While music has paradigmatic choices in its material resources — selections from a repertoire of available sounds — it does not have paradigmatic choices in systems of symbolic meaning. These choices affect how the sounds are experienced, but not what they mean, because they don’t mean anything symbolically. Music is not an underdetermined form of language; it is a different kind of system altogether.
The effects of music — its sense of significance, its emotional resonance, its social force — arise not from symbolic content but from the relational interplay between the material phenomena produced by the music maker and the perceptual value systems activated in the music listener. The process is dynamic, embodied, and affective, but not semiotic. The listener doesn’t interpret a message; they participate in an unfolding of sound that resonates with the unfolding of their own consciousness.
In that sense, music is not meaningful, but it is significant. It brings things to matter. It shapes how bodies feel, how time flows, how values take form — not through messages, but through presence, rhythm, energy, and movement. And that, in our relational model, is more than enough.
In our final post, we explore the implications of this model for identity and memory. If music doesn’t mean, how does it come to matter so deeply to the self?
6 Echoes of the Self: Music, Memory, and Individuation
Music stays with us. A childhood lullaby, a song from a first dance, an anthem of protest — such sounds are etched into experience with uncanny vividness. If music does not mean, how does it come to matter so much to the self?
This final post considers how music contributes to individuation: the development of a unique, situated consciousness within a social field. Without being semiotic, music still participates in shaping identity, memory, and the unfolding of the self.
Music as an Attractor in the Flow of Time
In our relational ontology, time is not a container, but the unfolding of processes. Consciousness is one such process. It does not sit behind experience but is shaped through it.
Music, too, unfolds in time. But more than that, it provides attractors for consciousness — recurring structures of sound that invite us to attend, entrain, and return. The listener’s own unfolding becomes rhythmically and emotionally co-organised with the unfolding of the music.
Over time, such co-unfoldings become part of the history of the self. They anchor moments of intensity, episodes of relational meaning, or shifts in our sense of what matters.
Memory Without Meaning
Because music is not semiotic, it does not carry memories as messages. It carries them as resonance.
A few bars of melody may trigger embodied responses, emotional surges, or sudden recollection. These are not acts of interpretation, but of activation: the re-emergence of prior value-laden experience prompted by similar sonic contours.
This is memory without representation. Music does not remind us by saying “remember,” but by feeling us back into an earlier configuration of self-in-world.
Music and the Social Shaping of the Self
Individuation is not isolation. We become ourselves through our position within social systems of value. Music plays a central role in this, not because it expresses who we are, but because it selects what we respond to.
Tastes, scenes, and subcultures — all structured by musical value — contribute to the formation of identity. We hear ourselves through others' sounds, and we find affinity with others who resonate to the same patterns. Music draws boundaries not by expressing meanings but by activating shared valuations.
In this way, music contributes not to the symbolic construction of the self, but to the social activation of the self as a value-sensitive, relational body.
Conclusion
We have argued throughout this series that music is not a semiotic system. It does not construe the world symbolically, but instead unfolds as phenomena that activate patterns of social value in listeners.
This is not a lesser role. On the contrary, music’s capacity to shape attention, affect, memory, and identity — all without message or meaning — reveals a powerful domain of social functionality beyond semiosis.
Music does not speak. It does not say. It resonates. And in doing so, it helps shape the rhythms of living, the pulse of community, and the echoing self.
Coda — Listening Again: A Reflection on Music, Consciousness, and Social Value
This series has offered a view of music grounded not in message but in resonance — not in meaning, but in value. We’ve proposed a model in which the music maker instantiates material phenomena — patterns of sound — and the music listener, through embodied perception and shared social experience, values them. These phenomena do not express the inner life of the maker in symbolic terms, but they resonate with the listener’s own unfolding of consciousness, selecting from perceptual systems shaped by biology, culture, and history. It is through this resonance that music functions socially.
Throughout, we’ve avoided the temptation to classify music as a semiotic system, resisting the pressure to read music as if it were language. Instead, we’ve treated it as a material phenomenon within a social ecology, whose functioning is better understood in terms of value rather than meaning. The distinction is subtle but crucial. To call music meaningful risks importing assumptions of symbolic reference. To call it valuable foregrounds its role in selecting and reinforcing perceptual preferences, emotional dispositions, and social attunements.
In this way, we have been careful to preserve the full dimensionality of a relational ontology. Time, in this view, is not a backdrop for musical events, but the very dimension in which they unfold — and in which listening unfolds, too. Music and consciousness meet in time, process to process. Their resonance is not metaphorical. It is structural.
There are, of course, limits to any model. Music exceeds classification; it surprises us, shapes us, and follows us into memory. But the value of a model lies not in its closure, but in its capacity to guide new attention. If this one helps us listen more deeply — not only to music, but to how we relate, how we feel, how we attune to one another — then it has done enough.
And if, in the background, you hear the echo of a soundworld not yet named — a value still unfolding — then the model has done more than enough. It has begun to listen back.