1 Sound and the Self — Music as a Medium of Individuation
What does it mean to become someone? To become more distinctively oneself — more finely attuned to the values that matter, more differentiated in how one feels and acts? One answer begins not with words, but with sound.
This series explores music not as a form of communication, but as a material system that participates in the shaping of selves. It offers a view of music as a social system — not a semiotic one — that exerts selective pressure on the listener by activating perceptual values. In this view, music does not express meaning; it selects from a listener’s evolving capacity to categorise experience as value-laden. This process is not interpretive but formative.
A Relational Starting Point
Our point of departure is a relational ontology: the world is not made of things with intrinsic properties, but of processes and relations that unfold over time. In this ontology, time is not a background container but the dimension of unfolding itself — the becoming of the actual from the potential.
Within this framework, music emerges as a material process initiated by a music maker, and encountered by a music listener. The music maker actualises sounds from the material potential of their environment. These sounds are not semiotic signs; they are physical events that participate in social life by functioning as attractors of value — for listeners, not as messages to interpret, but as experiential pressures that select for how they come to feel and to be.
Individuation as Selection of Value
Listeners are not passive receivers. They are embodied participants in evolving perceptual ecologies. From early development onward, they acquire the capacity to categorise sensory experience — not just in terms of what something is, but in terms of how it matters. What is pleasing? What is compelling? What moves? What soothes?
Music, in this model, plays a special role: it modulates the unfolding of perception in time, intensifying the emergence of new value configurations. Just as the gaze of a caregiver selects perceptual categories in an infant — categories that later stabilise as social values — so too can musical environments shape the developing value landscape of a listener.
Over time, as music resonates with (and sometimes challenges) these perceptual value systems, it contributes to a listener's individuation — the increasingly distinct patterning of what matters and how. It does this without conveying meaning. Its function is not semantic but selective.
From Social Sound to Personal Becoming
Thus, the model unfolds: the music maker actualises sounds; the listener categorises them as value-laden; and in that ongoing resonance, the listener’s perceptual ecology is reorganised. The process is not interpretive but transformative. The music listener becomes who they are — not by decoding messages, but by resonating with patterns of sound that selectively reinforce or disrupt their existing structures of feeling.
This is music as individuation — as a medium through which consciousness is shaped, not by representation, but by selection of what comes to matter.
2 Resonance and Value — How Music Selects the Listener
If music doesn’t communicate meanings, what does it do? In this model, music works not by expression but by resonance. And what it resonates with is not thought or language, but the evolving system of perceptual values that underlies how we feel, act, and become.
This post explores how music functions as a system of material attractors that shape the unfolding of consciousness by selecting values — not through symbols, but through patterns of sound.
Music as Resonant Material Form
To begin with, music is made of sound — but not just any sound. It is sound organised in time by a music maker, who draws from the material potential of their environment. These sounds, once actualised, are phenomena: physical events that unfold as processes. They do not symbolise something else; they do not point beyond themselves. They are what they are — sonic movements in air that are socially recognised as music.
What makes them music is not what they mean, but how they resonate with human listeners — how they act upon systems of value.
Value as Perceptual Categorisation
Listeners encounter music not as empty receivers but as embodied perceivers with systems already attuned to patterns of value. These values are not abstract preferences; they are deeply adaptive categorisations of experience: what feels safe or dangerous, soothing or stimulating, familiar or strange.
Over time, these value categories develop in part through social exposure: to environments, to caregivers, to cultural practices — and to music. When listeners hear music, they do not decode it. Rather, they categorise it. And the act of categorising is itself value-laden: certain patterns are pleasing, others jarring; some attract, others repel.
This categorisation is a form of selection: a process by which the music listener’s perceptual systems are reinforced, challenged, or reorganised.
Resonance as Selection Pressure
From this view, music functions as a selective environment. Its temporal unfolding places pressure on the listener’s value systems, encouraging some patterns to persist and others to fade. Resonance is not passive alignment; it is active selection: a dynamic interaction between sound and the structures of feeling that emerge in response.
This is why music can feel profoundly shaping. It is not that the music means something and we understand it. It is that the music does something — and we are changed.
A Social System Without Symbols
Crucially, this selective function is social. The music maker and the listener are participants in a shared social space, even if they never meet. The music itself — as a pattern of sound — is not semiotic. It does not convey meaning. But it is social, because it acts upon socialised perceptual systems, reinforcing values that are shared, contested, or evolving within a culture.
It is precisely because music is not symbolic that it can reach beneath meaning and shape the contours of the self — not through persuasion or communication, but through resonant selection.
In the next post, we’ll explore how music’s unfolding in time contributes to this process — not as a sequence of events, but as a field of ongoing becoming. See you in Post 3: The Time of Music, The Time of Consciousness.
3 The Time of Music, The Time of Consciousness
We often speak of music unfolding in time — a song lasting three minutes, a symphony in four movements, a groove that builds over a few bars. But what kind of time is this?
In this post, we consider how music and consciousness unfold together, not by reference to the ticks of a clock, but as mutually resonant processes. Both music and consciousness are dynamic, patterned, and emergent — and their alignment is key to how music selects and shapes the self.
Time as the Unfolding of Process
In this model, time is not a container for events. It is not a neutral backdrop against which things happen. Instead, time is understood as the dimension of process — the unfolding of events in relation to one another.
This view, drawn from a relational ontology, treats time as relational, not absolute. A process does not unfold “in” time. The unfolding is time. Each sound in music — each pitch, rhythm, or texture — does not occupy a position on a timeline. It contributes to a field of unfolding, in which each moment is shaped by the movement before and after.
Consciousness Unfolds Too
Consciousness, too, unfolds as a process — not as a static self observing the world, but as a flow of attention, perception, emotion, and reflection. It is not a fixed container of experience but an emergent stream of becoming.
When we listen to music, our consciousness does not merely “keep time” with it. It is shaped by it. Our emotional tone, sense of movement, and felt continuity are continually entrained by the sound’s temporal patterns. The music doesn’t move “through” us — we move with it.
Resonant Alignment
This co-unfolding is not just synchrony. It is resonance. The rhythmic structure of the music entrains bodily rhythms: breath, heart rate, neural oscillations. The temporal contours of musical phrasing guide attention, shape anticipation, and modulate affect.
In short, the time of music becomes the time of consciousness. And this alignment becomes a condition for value selection. Patterns that resonate are reinforced. Patterns that jar or disrupt may be resisted, reframed, or even transform the listener.
Individuation Through Temporal Flow
Because the listener’s perceptual and affective systems are shaped in part through these encounters, music participates in the process of individuation: the differentiation of the self through experience.
This individuation is not random. It is patterned, contingent on the relational pressures of unfolding sound. And these pressures are exerted over time — not clock time, but the experiential time of processual becoming.
In the next post, we explore how this shaping of perception and value contributes to who we become, as social beings attuned to shared environments of sound and feeling. See you in Post 4: Becoming a Listener — Music and the Shaping of the Self.
4 Becoming a Listener — Music and the Shaping of the Self
What does it mean to “become a listener”? Not merely to hear sound, but to be formed by it — to have one’s perceptual and affective patterns shaped through encounters with music?
In this post, we look more closely at how music participates in individuation, guiding how listeners develop systems of value through repeated, resonant exposure to material patterns of sound.
From Reception to Selection
When we hear music, we don’t simply receive it — we select and categorise what we hear. That is, perceptual systems construct sound into forms that resonate with prior experience, attention, and expectation.
This selection isn’t passive. It draws on deeply embedded neurobiological systems shaped by previous interactions. And music, as a patterned field of material phenomena, activates and updates these systems.
The peahen doesn’t merely see the peacock’s tail — the perception of certain traits coincides with the activation of value systems shaped by evolutionary history. Likewise, music listeners don’t merely hear notes — their perceptual systems entrain with patterns of activated value.
Music as a Social Process
This means music-making is not simply expressive; it is formative. The music maker generates material patterns — vibrations in air — that function socially because they activate systems of value in listeners.
This activation is not semiotic. Music does not express meanings, propositions, or symbolic relationships. It shapes the listener’s perceptual systems not by representing the world, but by structuring their resonant potential.
Resonance and Value
Some patterns come to be experienced as beautiful, powerful, moving — not because they “mean” anything, but because they resonate with systems of value that have themselves been shaped over time.
Each encounter with music, then, is a point of contact in a longer process of social individuation. Listeners emerge not as blank slates but as valueful selves, continually being reshaped by patterns of sound.
No Listener Without Listening
There is no “listener” independent of the act of listening. One becomes a listener by being drawn into the field of sound, participating in the unfolding of its time, and allowing oneself to be patterned by it.
Music is not a language, but it is a force of formation. It creates no texts, conveys no messages — yet it plays a decisive role in who we become.
In the final post of the series, we’ll reflect on what this means for our understanding of music, self, and social life. Join us for Post 5: Music and the Value of Becoming.
5 Music and the Value of Becoming
Throughout this series, we’ve considered how music functions not as a language, not as a bearer of messages, but as a field of material phenomena through which value is activated in listeners. In this final post, we reflect on what this implies for our understanding of music, selfhood, and social life.
The Listener is Formed, Not Informed
To listen to music is not to interpret meaning, but to participate in a process. We do not decode messages; we become selves through resonance. The music maker offers sound — sound that functions socially because it activates value-laden systems in others. And in being activated, these systems are shaped, reinforced, or transformed.
This is individuation: the emergence of the self through actualisations of potential. Each moment of listening is a point on a path of becoming, where the listener is re-formed by material engagement with sound.
Music’s Social Force
Because these patterns are shared — performed, transmitted, repeated — music becomes a means by which social formations propagate. Musical traditions, styles, and innovations carry with them histories of value that continue to be reinstantiated in new listeners.
Music does not represent society; it reverberates through it. It binds communities not by conveying meanings, but by organising shared systems of affective resonance.
Time and the Self
This model demands a shift in how we think about time. Not as a sequence of external moments, but as the unfolding of processes — the unfolding of music, and the unfolding of consciousness in relation to it. When these unfoldings resonate, individuation occurs.
We are not static listeners receiving sounds, but dynamic processes of becoming, shaped by the music we encounter.
Music, Not As What It Is — But What It Does
In the end, music matters not because of what it expresses, but because of what it does. It has no message. But it has effects. It plays no role in a semiotic system. But it plays a formative role in the social development of value.
We do not look to music to find ourselves. We become ourselves in the listening.
No comments:
Post a Comment