1 Embodiment and Music Perception
In conventional accounts, music perception is often framed as the reception of auditory stimuli by a passive listener. However, from the perspective of relational ontology, such an account fails to recognise that perception is a dynamic process involving the body as a whole — a process that unfolds in time and activates systems of value as well as sensation.
On this view, the music listener is not a detached subject perceiving an external object, but a living participant in a field of ongoing material processes. The musical phenomenon — a temporally structured configuration of acoustic energy — engages with the listener’s embodied systems through patterns of resonance. These include not only the auditory system but also motor and affective systems whose response patterns have been shaped by both evolutionary inheritance and individual history.
Perception, in Edelman’s terms, involves the activation of value-categories: neuronal groups whose selection has been reinforced by their relevance to the organism’s past experiences. In the case of music, these value-categories correspond not to the semantic content of symbolic expression, but to patterns of sound that have acquired affective significance through repeated exposure, association, and social interaction.
The listener’s response is therefore not a decoding of meaning but a selective entrainment with patterns of sound that coincide with embodied value. Rhythmic and melodic structures are perceived not in abstraction, but as patterns that resonate with the body’s own temporal structures — those of breath, movement, and emotional modulation. The experience of music is thus not merely auditory, but deeply embodied.
Moreover, this embodied engagement is not passive. The listener's perceptual systems are active participants in the shaping of musical experience. The temporal progression of music entrains these systems in a way that is co-constitutive: the listener’s value-history structures the experience of the music, and the music’s unfolding patterns activate and potentially reshape that value-history in turn.
Importantly, this model does not attribute meaning to music in a semiotic sense. The music maker produces a material phenomenon — a configuration of sound energy — which functions socially by activating value in the listener. This social function does not involve symbolic construal or reference, but affective and perceptual resonance. Music is not interpreted as meaning; it is experienced as value.
The implications of this model will be pursued in subsequent posts, beginning with an examination of time not as a container of musical events but as a dimension of unfolding that links music, consciousness, and value in processes of resonance.
2 Temporal Unfolding and the Experience of Music
Within the framework of relational ontology, time is not conceived as a neutral container in which events are located. Rather, time is the dimension of the unfolding of processes — and consciousness itself is one such process. From this perspective, music and consciousness share a fundamental temporal architecture: both unfold, and both are constituted in and through their unfolding.
This has profound implications for our understanding of music perception. Music does not occur in time; it is time — or more precisely, it is a phenomenon constituted through temporally patterned material processes. These processes are not simply heard; they are experienced as becoming. The listener does not receive a completed object but participates in an unfolding whose temporality is intrinsic to its significance.
In listening to music, then, we are not encountering discrete sound-events strung along a timeline. We are experiencing a continuous modulation of patterned energy, whose temporality is experienced through the shifting configurations of resonance and value in our own bodily systems. These systems — motor, affective, perceptual — are themselves temporally structured. Their activity is synchronised with, and shaped by, the temporal articulation of the music.
This synchronisation is not imposed from without. It arises through mutual entrainment: a relational alignment between the temporality of the music and the temporality of the listener’s embodied systems. This entrainment is affective, not interpretive; it does not involve construing meaning, but actualising value through co-temporal resonance.
Moreover, just as music does not exist outside its temporal unfolding, neither does the listener. Consciousness, on this account, is not an observer of events in time but a field of unfolding processes. In the experience of music, the unfolding of sound and the unfolding of consciousness interpenetrate. The resonant interaction between them gives rise to the phenomenon of musical experience.
This view offers a relational, temporally grounded model of musical significance — one in which musical value is not decoded from symbolic content but emerges from the dynamic alignment of embodied time-structures. The listener’s experience is neither predetermined nor arbitrary; it is an outcome of processes of resonance that are structured by the history of prior selections — biological, social, and personal — that shape the listener’s systems of value.
The next post will turn from time to space, examining the spatiality of music not in terms of metric location, but as an emergent dimension of embodied resonance.
3 Resonant Space: Music and the Spatiality of Embodiment
If time is the unfolding of process, then space, in a relational ontology, is not an empty expanse in which entities are placed but a dimension emergent from the relational positioning of those entities. As such, space is always space-for-something — a functional dimension whose contours are shaped by the systems through which it is enacted.
In the context of music, space is not a static background in which sound occurs. Rather, it is an emergent property of the interaction between sound and the body. The experience of musical space arises from the organisation of auditory phenomena in relation to embodied systems of perception and orientation.
Musical sounds are patterned not only temporally but also in frequency, intensity, timbre, and stereo location — dimensions which are mapped by the auditory system onto embodied schemata. These schemata are spatial in a lived sense: they orient the body toward sources, textures, movements, and depths. Yet they do so not by reference to an objective geometry, but through patterns of resonance and difference.
Importantly, this spatiality is not simply perceived; it is enacted. The listener’s body is not a passive receiver of sonic information but a participant in the generation of musical space. Through affective orientation, motor resonance, and perceptual attunement, the body co-constructs the spatial character of the musical experience.
In this sense, musical space is not ‘in’ the music alone, nor solely in the body of the listener. It is a relational field — a space of co-ordination between the material phenomena produced by the music maker and the perceptual-cognitive-affective systems of the listener. The listener’s spatial experience is shaped by cultural histories, neural architectures, and previous selections that guide how value is distributed across the sonic field.
Thus, musical spatiality is not a mapping of abstract coordinates but an emergent dimension of value, shaped by the patterns of perceptual selection that music activates. In place of Cartesian extension, we find resonant orientation — a lived sense of proximity, distance, enclosure, and direction that arises through processes of co-activation.
The spatial character of music, then, is not separable from its social functioning. It is through space — as well as time — that music entrains affective and attentional alignment. And it is through such alignment that patterns of value are reinforced, refined, and redistributed across listeners.
In the next post, we turn to the body more directly — to consider how music functions as a relational interface between bodies, and how its sociality is enacted not through symbolic exchange, but through value-based synchrony.
4 Relational Bodies: Music and the Sociality of Value
In a relational ontology, the body is not a self-contained object but a nexus of processes — biological, social, and experiential — unfolding in time. Embodiment, on this view, is not merely the substrate of perception and action but the very site where value is activated and distributed. It is in and through embodied systems that experience becomes selectively patterned by relevance, salience, and valence.
When applied to music, this perspective reframes the question of sociality. Music is not a language; it does not symbolise shared meanings. Rather, it functions socially by activating systems of perceptual and affective value in listeners — systems that are themselves shaped by histories of social interaction and selection.
The music maker does not communicate meaning but produces patterns of sound that can entrain value-oriented responses. These responses are not imposed from without but emerge from the listener’s embodied repertoire of perceptual categorisations, affective dispositions, and motor resonances. The sociality of music, then, is not transactional but resonant: a matter of convergence in value activation across bodies.
This activation is not metaphorical. As Edelman’s theory of neuronal group selection proposes, perceptual systems are not separable from value systems; value is intrinsic to categorisation. When a listener hears a sequence of sounds, they are not merely decoding an acoustic signal. Rather, they are undergoing a process in which specific neuronal groups are recruited based on past experiences of coherence, salience, and affective significance.
Such value-based selection is what enables musical phenomena to function across individuals and communities without requiring symbolic mediation. In this sense, music operates at a different level of social complexity than language. Whereas language relies on shared systems of symbolic reference, music operates through convergences in value experience — processes which are more fundamental and more diffuse.
Thus, the sociality of music is not reducible to cultural codes or shared interpretations. It emerges in the attunement of bodies to one another through shared orientations to patterns of sound. These patterns do not convey content but modulate affective and attentional fields, generating synchrony, divergence, or transformation.
Music, in this light, is a medium through which bodies become co-regulated. Its social function is not to tell but to entrain — not to describe the world, but to shape our embodied stance within it.
In the following post, we explore the developmental implications of this model, asking how patterns of musical value take shape over time, and how listeners come to ‘tune in’ to the sonic fields they inhabit.
5 Significance Without Symbol: Why Music Isn’t a Language
A central insight of relational ontology is that not all systems that function socially do so through symbolisation. Music is a case in point. Though it clearly exerts social force — coordinating bodies, shaping affect, delineating identity — it does so without recourse to the symbolic resources that define semiotic systems.
Language is paradigmatically symbolic. It is a semiotic system because it construes meaning through a structured network of paradigmatic choices — sets of oppositions that instantiate values in a system of meaning potential. These choices are realised syntagmatically, that is, as selections instantiated in unfolding sequences. Meaning in language is symbolic value: it depends on the systemic differentiation of possible selections and their value within the system.
Music, by contrast, does not instantiate symbolic meaning. While it is built from choices in sound — in pitch, rhythm, timbre, dynamics — these are not choices in meaning. They are not selections within a semiotic system of paradigmatic oppositions that realise symbolic values. Rather, they are selections from material potential: sonic possibilities instantiated by the music maker in the unfolding of a musical process.
These sonic selections are not ‘interpreted’ by the listener in the manner of linguistic decoding. Instead, they entrain perceptual and affective systems that are already value-laden. In Edelman’s terms, perception is value-saturated: neural groups fire not only in relation to sensory input but in accordance with patterns of past value-based selection. What is perceived is already filtered by relevance and significance — but not symbolic significance.
It is in this sense that music is socially significant without being symbolic. The patterns of sound instantiated by a music maker can activate patterns of value in a listener — shaping mood, attention, orientation, and even motor synchrony — without invoking a symbolic code. This social functioning is real, but it is not semiotic.
One might ask whether the listener’s ‘interpretation’ of musical sound is analogous to reading a text. But this would miss the crux of the model. What occurs is not symbolic construal but experiential resonance: the listener’s bodily system entrains with the sonic pattern in ways shaped by their developmental and social history.
To avoid confusion, it may be helpful to clarify that while music lacks paradigmatic choices in meaning, it certainly involves choices in sound. These are meaningful for the music maker in terms of expressive intention and technique, and they may be perceived by listeners as patterned or coherent. However, these choices do not instantiate meanings in the semiotic sense — they do not realise symbolic values within a system of contrastive oppositions. Their social efficacy lies instead in the patterns of activation they produce across bodies.
Thus, music is not a language, not because it is imprecise or non-verbal, but because it belongs to a different order of social functioning. It is materially instantiated and socially resonant — but not symbolically construed.
The next post explores how these resonances are shaped developmentally, and how listeners come to inhabit musically organised fields of value through processes of embodied learning and environmental interaction.
6 Embodied Development and the Shaping of Musical Value
In relational ontology, value is not added to experience after the fact. It is co-constitutive of perception. Neural systems do not first register a ‘neutral’ world and then assign it meaning or significance; rather, they develop to perceive what has already been associated with adaptive value. Edelman’s theory of neuronal group selection captures this process: perceptual categories evolve in relation to patterns of value that have proven salient for the organism.
This has profound implications for music. It suggests that musical value is not inherent in the sound itself, nor universally shared across listeners. Instead, value is entrained developmentally. The perceptual systems of a listener are shaped through repeated exposure to sounds that co-occur with affective or social salience. As the infant grows, certain sonic patterns — rhythms, contours, textures — come to be associated with comfort, play, movement, or attention. These associations become stabilised as value-categories.
Importantly, these patterns are not arbitrary. They are grounded in embodied activity. Rhythmic regularities coincide with walking and rocking; melodic contours with vocal intonation; timbral changes with shifts in emotional tone. Music, in this sense, extends the embodied regularities of early developmental life — not by symbolising them, but by reinstantiating their temporal and affective logic.
This process is highly social. The value of particular musical patterns is mediated by the social environment. Cultural practices, family rituals, peer interactions, media exposure — all contribute to shaping the listener’s value-laden auditory field. Musical value, therefore, is not private or idiosyncratic, but socially patterned and historically sedimented.
Yet this sociality does not imply semioticity. The transmission of musical value occurs not through the encoding and decoding of symbols but through embodied participation in patterned sonic environments. The music listener does not construe meaning from sound but enters into resonance with it, in ways shaped by their bodily history.
This distinction is key. It highlights the relational, rather than representational, nature of music’s social function. Music does not ‘express’ a message from maker to listener. Rather, the music maker instantiates patterns of sound that, through repetition, variation, and affective force, have the capacity to activate patterns of value in listeners. This process unfolds within a shared world of embodiment — a world structured by movement, affect, interaction, and development.
Such a view does not reduce music to biology, nor to culture, but situates it at their intersection: as a materially instantiated practice whose social force depends on the developmental shaping of value-laden perception.
The next post explores how different musics produce different fields of resonance, and how individuals navigate and inhabit these sonic terrains.
7 Resonant Fields: Musical Plurality and the Dynamics of Social Value
If music’s social function lies in its capacity to activate patterns of value in listeners, then no single piece of music can be expected to evoke value in all listeners equally. Listeners are differently shaped by their developmental histories, and music, accordingly, gives rise not to a single field of value, but to multiple resonant fields — each constituted by a particular listener’s history of embodied engagement with sound.
This plurality is not a weakness of the model but a central feature of its ontology. Musical value is not fixed in the sounds themselves, nor purely in the social structures in which music circulates. It emerges relationally, through the dynamic interplay between sound patterns produced by the music maker and the perceptual systems of music listeners — systems that are themselves the product of social, cultural, and biological development.
A resonant field, in this context, refers to the temporally unfolding co-activation of perceptual and value systems in response to patterned sound. These fields are structured by familiarity, anticipation, and affective salience. What counts as a ‘musical pattern’ in one listener’s perceptual world may not register as such in another’s. The field of resonance is thus an attractor landscape — a dynamic topology of value shaped by repeated exposure and embodied entrainment.
This helps explain both the diversity and the depth of musical experience. One listener might find resonance in the pulsing textures of electronic music, another in the melodic articulations of a folk ballad, and still another in the microtonal inflections of a traditional maqam. Each of these musics is not simply heard — it is felt, inhabited, valued — in ways that are not interchangeable.
Importantly, this model does not imply relativism. Resonant fields are not wholly subjective. They are socially and materially scaffolded, often institutionally supported, and capable of shifting through contact, education, and practice. A listener’s field of resonance is not static but can be expanded, refined, or redirected. The plasticity of perceptual systems allows for the possibility of musical growth — a movement across fields, an enrichment of the value landscape.
Musicians, too, are situated within resonant fields. Their choices are not unconstrained expressions of inner creativity, but selections from within a field of attractors — sonic patterns that have, over time, demonstrated the capacity to resonate. Innovation, in this view, is not invention ex nihilo but the perturbation of existing fields in ways that open new attractor basins.
Musical plurality, then, is not a problem to be solved but a fact to be embraced. It reflects the relational nature of musical value: the fact that music functions socially not by representing shared meanings, but by activating shared (and sometimes divergent) histories of embodied salience.
The next post will explore the concept of affordance in musical experience — the sense in which music calls for movement, response, or change.
8 Affordance and Activation: Music as a Call to the Body
In the relational model developed across this series, music does not transmit messages or meanings. Rather, it functions socially by activating patterned responses in the bodies of listeners. One dimension of this activation that warrants closer attention is affordance: the ways in which musical sound solicits, invites, or entrains movement.
Affordance, in its classical ecological formulation (Gibson, 1979), refers to the action possibilities offered by the environment in relation to an organism’s capacities. A chair affords sitting to a body of the right scale and configuration; a path affords walking. In the context of music, affordances are not spatial but temporal and affective. A rhythmic pulse affords entrainment; a harmonic cadence affords anticipation and resolution; a sudden silence affords stillness, tension, or recalibration.
These affordances are not merely functional. They are felt as invitations to move, sway, breathe, tense, or release — not in conscious response to what the music ‘means’, but through the immediate activation of value-coding systems in the listener. Musical affordances thus operate at the level of embodied disposition. They arise from the attunement of the listener’s sensorimotor system to particular patterns of sound, and they often reflect a history of cultural participation, physical practice, and social interaction.
Such affordances are fundamental to the sociality of music. Shared rhythmic entrainment, for example, can generate collective synchrony without the mediation of language. Dance, gesture, and coordinated vocalisation emerge not from semantic interpretation but from co-participation in affordances of movement and timing. These phenomena exemplify how music makes social cohesion possible without requiring propositional content.
Moreover, affordances help explain the cross-modality of musical experience. Music is not perceived solely through audition; it reverberates across tactile, kinaesthetic, and interoceptive domains. A bass line may be felt in the chest, a melodic contour may lift the posture, a crescendo may quicken the breath. These are not metaphors but embodied activations: value-laden responses of the organism to patterns in the soundscape that afford temporal structuring and affective alignment.
Notably, affordances are not uniform. What music affords to one listener may not be available to another. This variation is grounded in histories of exposure, training, and bodily familiarity. A complex polyrhythm may afford synchronisation to a dancer from one tradition but not to a listener unfamiliar with its underlying logic. Affordance, like resonance, is situated.
In sum, musical affordances are neither purely subjective nor entirely inherent in the sounds themselves. They are relational effects — emergent from the interplay of patterned material phenomena and the perceptual-action systems of embodied, socially situated listeners. They help explain how music does something without saying something.
The final post in this sequence will reflect on the broader implications of this relational model for understanding music’s place in human life.
Conclusion: Music as Embodied Relation — Towards a Relational Ontology of Sound and Sociality
This series has sought to articulate a relational ontology of music grounded in the material and embodied realities of both music makers and listeners. Departing from semiotic and symbolic models that construe music as a system of meaning, the approach presented here foregrounds music as a material phenomenon that activates and entrains value-laden bodily systems.
At the heart of this model lies the distinction between the music maker, who instantiates patterned material phenomena — sounds structured in time — and the music listener, whose embodied perceptual and affective systems respond through simultaneous activations of categorical and value systems. Music is thus not ‘meaningful’ in a semiotic sense but is valueful: it selectively mobilises perceptual categories and evokes adaptive bodily responses.
Time, conceived as the unfolding of processes rather than a linear, external parameter, is central to this relational dynamic. The music maker’s unfolding creation resonates with the listener’s unfolding consciousness, producing dynamic affordances and opportunities for social coordination through shared sensorimotor engagement.
This model aligns with Edelman’s Theory of Neuronal Group Selection by emphasising the role of value-categories that are activated in perception, reflecting an organism’s adaptive responses. Music’s sociality emerges from this embodied resonance, not from symbolic communication or representational coding.
Several implications arise:
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Music’s social function is immediate and embodied, grounded in movement, rhythm, and affective activation rather than language-like meaning.
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Cultural variation and individual histories shape the affordances music offers, making musical experience deeply situated and context-dependent.
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Music engages multiple modalities simultaneously, crossing auditory, tactile, kinaesthetic, and interoceptive domains, underscoring its holistic embodiment.
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Understanding music through a relational ontology challenges traditional musicology and cognitive models that privilege symbolic interpretation, inviting interdisciplinary dialogue across neuroscience, philosophy, and social theory.
This relational perspective reframes music not as a system of signs or messages but as an ongoing relational process of embodied interaction and social coordination. It honours the vitality of music as a living phenomenon — a song of the self and the social body, dynamically unfolding in time.
Reflective Coda: Embracing the Relational Pulse of Music
As we conclude this exploration, it is worth reflecting on the profound shift in perspective that a relational ontology invites. By moving away from traditional semiotic frameworks that seek fixed meanings within music, we open space for appreciating music as a living, temporal, and embodied phenomenon — a dynamic interplay between maker and listener, sound and body, unfolding consciousness and social value.
This view challenges us to rethink familiar assumptions: that music must ‘mean’ something to be significant; that communication requires symbolic coding; that musical experience is primarily cognitive rather than embodied. Instead, music emerges as a process of mutual attunement, an ongoing co-creation of value realised through embodied resonance and temporal flow.
In this light, each musical moment is both singular and shared — a fleeting yet potent convergence of perceptual and affective systems, shaped by history, culture, and individual biography, yet transcending them through the immediacy of lived experience.
As scholars, musicians, and listeners, embracing this relational pulse invites humility and curiosity. It invites us to listen differently: to attend not just to notes and rhythms but to the embodied experience of sound as it moves through us and between us.
Ultimately, this perspective underscores music’s irreducible vitality — not as a text to decode, but as a living phenomenon that enacts and enriches the social fabric of life itself.
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