1 Music Between Us: Resonance, Belonging, and the Social Field
Music isn’t just something we experience alone. While the sounds we hear, the rhythms we feel, and the melodies we hum happen within us, music also lives between us — in the shared spaces where people gather, communicate, and connect. It’s in these social fields that music becomes something more than just sound: it becomes a powerful process for creating and sustaining relationships, communities, and identities.
But how does this happen? How can sequences of sounds that begin as material phenomena transform into something that pulls us together, makes us feel like we belong, or helps us express who we are — individually and collectively?
The answer lies in the way music activates shared patterns of value in listeners. When music is performed or played, it produces material phenomena — vibrations, rhythms, tones — that resonate with our perceptual systems. These resonances select and reinforce value-categories within each listener’s embodied experience. Because humans are social creatures, these individual activations echo outwards, coordinating and aligning responses across groups.
This alignment isn’t just about everyone clapping or tapping their foot together. It creates a social field — an environment of collective resonance — where shared feelings, meanings, and identities can emerge and evolve.
Understanding music as a social process means appreciating its role beyond the individual ear. It’s about recognising music’s power to shape social bonds and communities, to mark moments of belonging or difference, and to participate in ongoing cultural dialogues.
In this series, we’ll explore how music functions within these social fields, how collective resonance arises, and how identity is both expressed and constructed through musical experience.
2 Tuning In: How Resonance Builds a Social Field
Imagine sitting in a concert hall, a drum circle, or even just a car with friends and a shared playlist. The music plays — and something begins to happen. People sway in time, tap feet, nod heads. A sense of synchrony emerges. But more than just bodies aligning, there’s a feeling of connection in the air: a sense that we are experiencing this together. This is the beginning of what we call a social field.
So what is a social field, and how does music help generate it?
A social field is not a thing but a process — a dynamic system of coordination among people. It arises when multiple individuals are drawn into shared patterns of attention, emotion, and value. Music is especially powerful in catalysing this process, because it generates material patterns (sound, rhythm, dynamics) that act directly on our perceptual systems. These patterns activate value-categories — the listener’s embodied mechanisms for selecting and reinforcing what matters.
When a group of people encounter the same music, their value-categories can entrain with the same patterns. This doesn’t mean everyone feels exactly the same thing, but it does mean that their feelings are drawn into alignment. Like tuning forks set into motion by the same vibration, people come into resonance — not just with the music, but with one another.
This mutual resonance builds the field. It makes the air feel charged, the group feel bonded, and the moment feel significant. It’s why a shared song can feel like a shared memory. It’s why strangers at a festival can become, if only briefly, a community.
Importantly, this doesn’t rely on language or meaning in the traditional sense. Music functions socially not because it tells us something, but because it activates what already matters within us — and aligns that activation across others.
In the next post, we’ll look more closely at how music shapes collective identity: how shared resonance over time builds shared patterns of belonging.
3 Resonance and Belonging: Music and Collective Identity
We’ve seen how music creates a shared social field by aligning the value systems of listeners in real time. But what happens when these moments accumulate? When music becomes part of the ongoing life of a group — a family, a subculture, a nation?
Over time, shared musical experience gives rise to collective identity.
This doesn’t mean that music represents an identity in the way a flag or logo might. Rather, music actively shapes identity — by reinforcing patterns of feeling, action, and affiliation that are shared among those who resonate with it. These aren’t symbolic representations; they’re patterns of embodied experience.
When people return again and again to particular musical styles, artists, or practices, they are participating in a process of cultural individuation: the drawing of meaningful distinctions among groups through different histories of value activation. Just as each person’s musical preferences reflect their individual histories of resonance, so too do communities come to be marked by their shared musical pathways.
This is how genres, scenes, and traditions emerge — not as abstract categories, but as evolving constellations of resonance. Musical identity is not static. It’s dynamic, relational, and always in process. It’s built from the social experience of music as something that moves us together.
This is also why musical practices — whether local choirs, protest chants, DJ nights, or indigenous ceremonies — play such a powerful role in maintaining social cohesion. They aren’t just about the music; they’re about the continuous re-creation of us.
In the next post, we’ll explore the implications of this model: how thinking of music as a social process of resonance changes how we understand culture, politics, and the shaping of shared worlds.
4 Music and the Shaping of Shared Worlds
If music plays a role in forming collective identity, then it also participates in shaping the worlds those identities inhabit.
These worlds are not geographic or economic in the first instance — they are felt worlds, structured by values: what matters, what moves us, what connects us. They are built from shared histories of resonance.
When a musical style circulates within a community, it becomes woven into the fabric of daily life. It tunes attention, shapes expectation, and structures how experience unfolds. A groove, a chant, a melodic motif — these aren’t just sonic artefacts. They are attractors in a social field, drawing bodies and minds into alignment, making collective experience possible.
This is why music has long been tied to ritual, protest, celebration, mourning, transformation. It helps hold a world together — or challenge it from within.
When values shift — through migration, political upheaval, or cultural transformation — musical practices shift too. But they do more than reflect these changes. They participate in them. Music enacts social change, by reconfiguring patterns of resonance and reshaping the dynamics of collective feeling.
In this light, we can understand music not as an escape from reality, but as a force within it — one that draws on embodied experience to open new possibilities of relation.
Coda: Music as Emergent Social Resonance
This series has examined how music functions not merely as a stimulus to individual perception, but as a socially situated process of resonance. Rather than positing music as a symbolic system conveying shared meaning, the account developed here locates music’s sociality in the shared activation of values — in the co-resonance of listeners within historically and materially situated fields.
Music’s social effects do not arise through semantic content, but through dynamic processes in which listeners' perceptual systems entrain with sound patterns that have acquired value within a social context. These processes are relational and emergent: they do not transmit fixed identities or affiliations, but help to constitute them in the unfolding of musical experience. In this sense, music plays an active role in shaping social fields, affiliative bonds, and forms of collective identity.
Critically, then, music’s social function is not derivative of meaning, but foundational to its value. Every musical instance is embedded in a network of bodies, histories, and technologies that condition the possibilities for resonance. The social dimension of music is thus neither an overlay nor an interpretation; it is the condition under which musical value becomes actual.
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