The Ontology of the Audience: Listening as Field, Process, and Value Coalescence

1 Beyond the Listener: Audience as a Collective Field

In most everyday talk, we speak of “the audience” as if it were a list of individuals. People sitting in chairs. Users with headphones. Consumers of content. Yet beneath this common sense view lies a richer reality — one that becomes visible when we reframe music not simply as sound received, but as a process of value coalescence in time, unfolding within and through those who listen.

This post begins a new series on The Ontology of the Audience, in which we propose a shift in how we understand what it means to listen. Instead of taking the listener as a passive endpoint for musical transmission, we explore the audience as a dynamic field — a social-material formation in which value is not merely received but realised through resonance.

From Listener to Field

In earlier series, we developed a relational ontology of music in which musical practices generate attractors of value — recurring patterns, motifs, textures or gestures that draw affective and social investment. Music functions not by meaning something in the semiotic sense, but by activating value within collective fields.

The audience, then, is not merely a backdrop to this activation. It is where such value takes shape. The listener does not stand outside the music, decoding it. Rather, they are inside the process — participating in the very field of resonance that makes the music socially real.

In this view, listening is not reducible to individual perception. It is a relational process — one that spans bodies, technologies, spaces, and shared histories. The audience emerges as a temporally unfolding phenomenon, shaped by how attention is distributed, how resonance occurs, and how collective dispositions orient toward what is heard.

Listening as Process, Not Point

To speak of “a listener” risks freezing the act of listening into a static moment or isolated subject. But listening is not a point; it is a process that unfolds in time. It includes anticipation, attention, recognition, absorption, repetition — all of which stretch across a duration. Listening begins before the music starts and continues long after it ends, as traces reverberate in memory, discussion, or embodied response.

This temporal unfolding is central to the ontology I’m developing here. Just as music is a process that takes time, so too is listening — not merely as reception, but as participation in the generation of collective value.

The Audience as a Field of Resonance

To call the audience a “field” is to invoke a different kind of entity — one that is extended, dynamic, and responsive. A field is not a container, but a set of relations in motion. The field of the audience is shaped by:

• how bodies are gathered (spatially, technologically, culturally),

• how attention is patterned (individually and collectively), and

• how value is activated through resonance with the music.

In this sense, the audience is not simply “there”; it is constituted in the event of listening. It does not exist in advance of the music, but arises through its unfolding. And its boundaries are fluid — stretching across headphones, livestreams, dancefloors, or public rituals, depending on the configurations of the event.

Toward a New Theory of Listening

In the coming posts, we’ll explore how this ontology of the audience unfolds across attention, technology, individuation, and time. We’ll ask how listeners coalesce or diverge in their resonances, how technologies mediate listening fields, and how the traces of listening persist after the sound has faded.

By rethinking the audience as a co-constitutor of musical value, we shift the focus from reception to participation — and from the individual ear to the collective field of listening.

2 Attention and Resonance: How Listening Coalesces Value

If the audience is a dynamic field rather than a collection of isolated individuals, then we must ask: What moves within that field? What animates the process of collective listening such that value becomes actualised? In this post, we propose that attention and resonance form the core dynamics of this process — not as internal states of individual minds, but as patterned relational phenomena within social-material fields.

Listening as the Distribution of Attention

Attention is often construed as a limited resource belonging to the individual — something we “pay” to particular stimuli. But in a relational ontology, attention is not a commodity; it is a pattern of alignment. It involves bodies orienting, affectively and materially, toward unfolding events in time. In collective settings, attention becomes distributed — sometimes converging in synchrony, sometimes fragmenting across divergent foci.

When listeners attend to music, they do not merely perceive sound; they enter into temporal coordination with its unfolding. Attention brings potential into instance. It is by attending that the listener actualises a particular attractor of value — a rhythm, a timbral shift, a harmonic turn — from the field of sonic possibility.

This is true not only at the level of individual perception, but across the field of the audience. A song does not become “an anthem” because of its internal structure alone. It becomes one when a critical density of attention coheres around it, generating collective resonance. In such moments, attention itself functions as a binding force — a means by which music becomes socially charged.

Resonance as Value Actualisation

Resonance, in this framework, is not metaphorical. It names the material-affective process by which the field of the audience responds to music’s attractors of value. It is not simply that the audience identifies with the music, nor that they interpret it. Rather, resonance describes how particular musical phenomena become co-extensive with listeners’ dispositions, histories, and embodied states.

Resonance is neither wholly personal nor entirely shared. It operates across a gradient: some listeners resonate deeply, others superficially; some in synchrony, others asynchronously. But where resonance occurs, it actualises value. The attractor draws not only attention, but investment — a binding of social, emotional, and material energies to a particular sonic formation.

This is the point at which music’s social function takes shape. The process is not one of decoding meaning, but of generating collective coherence. Through resonance, the audience does not merely react to the music; it participates in its actualisation as a social event.

The Social Patterning of Attention and Resonance

Neither attention nor resonance is random. Both are socially patterned — shaped by cultural codes, prior experience, spatial arrangements, and technological mediation. A listener’s capacity to attend to a particular timbre, rhythm, or gesture is not natural or universal; it is cultivated through habituation, exposure, and embodied training.

Similarly, resonance is structured by social position. What resonates for one listener may be imperceptible to another, not because of personal taste alone, but because of differing social histories, affective investments, and interpretive repertoires.

Yet these differences do not preclude collective resonance. Rather, they give it its contour. A crowd at a concert, a family in a living room, or a dispersed online audience may resonate with different aspects of the same music — but in doing so, they contribute to the formation of a value field that is shared precisely because it is internally differentiated.

From Attention to Coalescence

In sum, attention and resonance are not static attributes of individual listeners, but dynamically unfolding processes within the collective field of the audience. They are the means by which music becomes more than sound — by which it is taken up, responded to, and co-actualised as a site of value.

In the next post, we will turn to the role of technology in mediating this field. How do different listening contexts — from headphones to stadium speakers — configure the possibilities for attention, resonance, and value coalescence?

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3 The Technologies of Listening: Mediation and the Shaping of Audience Fields

If attention and resonance are central to how listening actualises value, then technologies of listening must be seen not as peripheral supports but as constitutive constraints and affordances. They do not simply carry music to the listener; they participate in shaping the very conditions under which listening — as a relational and temporal process — can occur.

In this post, we explore the role of technological mediation in the formation of audience fields. We examine how the material forms of sound reproduction — from concert halls to headphones, vinyl records to streaming platforms — condition the temporalities, spatialities, and collectivities of listening.

Technologies as Co-Constitutive of the Audience

A common tendency is to treat technologies of listening as neutral containers. In such views, a piece of music remains essentially the same whether heard live, streamed, or played on vinyl — and the audience remains a pre-existing group that listens through technology.

Yet from a relational ontology, technologies are not transparent channels. They are active mediators: they afford certain kinds of attention and inhibit others; they produce particular kinds of resonance and preclude others. In short, they help constitute what the audience is — how it is distributed, how it listens, and what kinds of value are likely to coalesce.

This shifts our focus: rather than asking what technology does to listening, we ask how it configures the field in which listening can happen.

Isolation and Co-Presence

Consider the contrast between a pair of headphones and a live concert venue. Both can be sites of intense attention and resonance. But they construct radically different audience fields.

Headphones isolate the listener — not necessarily in a social sense, but in the sense of containment. The sonic environment is bounded, often privatised, and relatively free from immediate external distraction. The resonance here is often inwardly felt, embodied in solitude, and intensified by repetition.

A live venue, by contrast, is a site of co-presence. The spatial field of the audience is physically constituted, and resonance can become synchronised across bodies — through cheers, dance, collective silence. Attention becomes both individually maintained and socially reinforced. The energy of others is not an intrusion but a medium.

These differences are not merely surface phenomena. They are ontological: they shape the very temporality and materiality of the listening process. They determine not just how music is received, but what kind of experience it becomes.

Standardisation and Platformed Listening

With the advent of digital platforms, listening has become increasingly structured by algorithms, interfaces, and recommendation systems. These systems are not neutral curators. They orient attention, narrow resonant possibilities, and consolidate audience fields around predictive logics.

In doing so, they enable new forms of value coalescence — rapid, large-scale, but also more uniform. The emergence of viral tracks, curated moods, and globally standardised genres are not purely cultural trends; they are technical achievements of platform architecture.

Platformed listening alters not only what is heard, but how resonance circulates. The audience field becomes fragmented into micro-clusters, each shaped by algorithmic attractors. While this allows for new modes of individuation, it also introduces structural constraints on the scope and diversity of value realisation.

Residual Materialities

Even in digital contexts, technologies retain residual materialities. A smartphone speaker is not a neutral output device; it flattens frequencies, compresses dynamics, and shapes what can resonate. A concert hall, designed with specific acoustic ideals, favours certain kinds of musical temporalities and excludes others. Vinyl introduces noise, fragility, and sequencing — all of which become part of the listening field.

These materialities matter because resonance is embodied. It is not just a cognitive response to symbolic form, but a material process of alignment. The device, the room, the format — each helps determine what can be attended to and what can resonate.

Technologies as Value-Shaping Fields

In sum, listening technologies are not backdrops to audience formation; they are active participants in the shaping of audience fields. They help determine how attention is distributed, how resonance occurs, and what values are likely to coalesce. They contribute to the individuation of listening subjects and the collectivisation of listening fields.

In the next post, we will turn to scale — asking how audience fields overlap and diverge, and how listening operates across nested formations from private to public, local to global.

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4 Scales of Listening: From Intimate Fields to Public Resonance

In previous posts, we explored the dynamics of attention and resonance, and the role of technology in shaping the audience field. In this post, we extend this framework by considering scale — not merely as size or reach, but as a structuring principle in the constitution of listening. What does it mean to say that an audience is local or global, intimate or massive? And how do different scales of listening interact, overlap, or conflict?

Our claim is that audience fields are multi-scalar and nested, rather than flat or mutually exclusive. They are constituted across orders of proximity and distribution, with different attractors of value becoming salient depending on the social and material scale of engagement.

The Myth of the Unified Audience

It is tempting to speak of “the audience” as a single, bounded entity — the concert crowd, the streaming demographic, the fan base. But in a relational ontology, no audience is ever fully unified. Rather, audience fields are formed through processes of alignment and divergence, across multiple layers of coalescence.

At a live event, for example, resonance may synchronise some bodies in rhythmic movement or chant, while others remain still, withdrawn, or attuned to different features of the sound. These listeners do not form separate audiences; they occupy different scales of attunement within a shared field.

This fractal structure holds at larger scales. The viral success of a track on a global platform may suggest mass uptake, but closer inspection reveals differentiated fields of listening — regional inflections, subcultural appropriations, divergent modes of resonance — all nested within what appears as a singular event.

Intimacy and Micro-Audiences

At the most immediate level, we can think of listening as forming intimate fields — a single person wearing headphones, a small group sharing a playlist, a private moment of musical attachment. These are not simply scaled-down versions of mass audiences. They involve different kinds of resonance: more durational, less synchronised, more affectively recursive.

These micro-audiences are not private in the sense of being untouched by social forces. They are deeply structured by prior experiences, cultural memory, and technological mediation. But they exhibit a different tempo of value coalescence — often slower, more contingent, and oriented around individuation rather than collective identity.

Yet they also scale up. Intimate listening practices can give rise to public rituals — as when a deeply personal track becomes an anthem, or a niche genre develops communal significance. The movement from intimate to collective is not linear, but recursive: collective resonance feeds back into individual listening, and vice versa.

Assemblages of the Public

At larger scales, audience fields become public assemblages. These are not totalising publics, but contingent alignments across space, platform, and affective investment. A festival audience, a national media moment, a global fan culture — each forms a different kind of assemblage, constituted through shared orientation toward a musical event or figure.

These publics are rarely coherent. They are held together by attractors of value — stylistic motifs, cultural associations, iconic performances — but remain internally differentiated. Importantly, the same attractor can function differently across scales: a sonic motif may be an insider signal at the local level, and a cliché at the global level.

Scale thus shapes the modality of resonance. At small scales, resonance may be deeply embodied and specific; at large scales, it often becomes more symbolic or representative. Yet both scales are necessary to the ecology of music’s social life.

Nested and Interacting Fields

Audience fields are not bounded by scale; they are nested and permeable. A local listening culture may be shaped by global flows; a global trend may be reinterpreted through local resonance. Likewise, micro-audiences may selectively affiliate with larger publics — adopting, rejecting, or reframing collective values.

This interplay is crucial to understanding the ontology of the audience. It is not that audiences “exist” at one level or another, but that they are constantly constituted across levels — through interactions, contradictions, and recursive resonances. Scale is not a static property but a dynamic effect of social-material processes.

Toward a Relational Cartography

If we are to theorise audiences in a way that respects their complexity, we need a relational cartography: one that maps not size or reach, but configurations of resonance and attention across nested fields. Such a map would show how musical value emerges and shifts as it moves between intimate and public domains, between the personal and the political, between the isolated and the collective.

In the next and final post of this series, we will reflect on what it means to theorise the audience ontologically — not as a demographic, a market, or a group of subjects, but as a field of potential and instance shaped by listening, resonance, and coalescence.

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5 Listening as Ontological Process: Rethinking the Audience

What does it mean to theorise the audience not as a collection of listeners but as an ontological field — a space in which values coalesce through processes of listening? Throughout this series, we have developed a relational model of the audience grounded in attention, resonance, technology, and scale. In this final post, we draw these threads together to propose a shift: from the audience as object to audience as processual field — emergent, distributed, and dynamic.

This shift is not merely conceptual. It has implications for how we understand music, meaning, and collective experience — especially in contexts of cultural flux, technological change, and identity formation.

From Group to Field

The conventional view treats the audience as a group of subjects — assembled physically or imagined demographically, often unified by shared preferences or modes of consumption. This framing presumes an already-constituted subject who listens, evaluates, and responds.

But in a relational ontology, subjectivity itself is formed within processes of listening. The listener is not pre-given, but actualised through attention and resonance. The audience, accordingly, is not a group of pre-existing listeners, but a field of potential value — structured by who or what is attended to, and how resonance unfolds.

This means that audience formation is ontological: it is the emergence of material configurations of attention, synchrony, and valuation across bodies, devices, and social space.

The Temporality of Audience

Audiences are often treated as temporally stable: a fanbase, an era, a market segment. But from a processual perspective, they are transient configurations — coming into being with each event of listening, and dissolving or transforming thereafter.

Even mass publics — those gathered by broadcasts, platforms, or global rituals — are held together not by permanence, but by the temporality of shared resonance. The moment of collective attention is not epiphenomenal; it is the audience.

This view foregrounds listening as a temporal unfolding, not just an act of perception. Audience fields emerge in time, as bodies, devices, and orientations align — however briefly — around sonic attractors of value.

Resonance as Value Actualisation

Resonance, in this model, is more than affective reaction. It is the material actualisation of value. A track resonates because it activates particular potentialities — emotional, cultural, embodied — that are co-present in the listening field. These resonances are not merely reactions to the music; they are how the audience field realises its structure in that moment.

This process is cumulative. As particular motifs or modes of listening are repeatedly instantiated, they begin to function as attractors — shaping the probabilities of future resonances. In this way, audience fields develop histories, textures, and gradients of familiarity — not as stored memory, but as dispositional fields of potential.

Mediation Without Transparency

Throughout the series, we have stressed the role of technological mediation. Technologies of listening — from spatial acoustics to platform algorithms — do not merely deliver sound; they configure the very possibilities of attention and resonance. They shape what kind of audience can be actualised, and how value can be distributed across scales.

Crucially, technologies are not neutral enablers. They impose material constraints and affordances that structure the ontology of the audience field. This calls for a reflexive approach to audience research — one that considers not only who listens, but how the listening is organised materially.

Listening as Social Process

Finally, this model positions listening as a social process, not a private experience. Even in its most intimate form, listening is shaped by shared cultural values, learned dispositions, and embodied histories. When value coalesces around a piece of music, it does so not in isolation, but within a field of collective resonance — however diffuse or uneven.

This is why the audience cannot be reduced to metrics or markets. It is not an aggregate of preferences, but a semi-stable attractor in a dynamic system of social-material relations. To understand audiences, we must therefore attend to how listening constitutes subjectivities, affiliations, and values — not after the fact, but in the moment of resonance.

Concluding Reflection

The ontology of the audience, as we have sketched it here, is not a fixed map but a shifting topology — a dynamic landscape in which processes of listening give rise to fields of value. These fields are mediated by technology, modulated by scale, and instantiated in time.

By thinking of audiences as emergent configurations rather than pre-existing groups, we open new possibilities for analysing music as a social and material phenomenon — one that is not simply consumed, but actualised in and through collective processes of listening.

This shift, we propose, is not only philosophically coherent with a relational ontology — it is necessary for any adequate account of how music matters, and to whom.

Affective Dimensions: Value, Emotion, and Music II

1 Feeling the Music — Emotion as the Pulse of Value

Why does a single chord bring us to tears? Why does a rhythm compel us to move, to smile, to weep, to remember? Long before we analyse, describe, or critique music, we feel it. This feeling—rich, immediate, and often ineffable—is not an afterthought of cognition; it is foundational to music’s power. In this series, we explore how emotion anchors musical experience in our bodies, our brains, and our social lives.

Emotion is not merely something we have in response to music. In a relational ontology, emotion is a way of being-with—a way of being attuned to the world. And music, more than perhaps any other human practice, resonates with our affective life. It activates bodily states, aligns us with temporal contours, and draws us into shared spaces of feeling.

In earlier series, we traced how music unfolds in time, emerges in collective fields, and coalesces as value in bodily and social resonance. Here, we turn to the affective dynamics at the heart of that coalescence. For affect is not separable from value: it is the felt dimension of value activation. It is the body’s way of registering what matters.

Edelman’s neurobiological model helps us situate this insight. For Edelman, value is not an abstract principle but a biological condition—mediated by affect and shaped through experience. The brain’s value systems do not passively observe the world; they tune perception and action according to the organism’s history of adaptive relevance. In music, this means that emotional experience is not a response to meaning—it is the activation of meaning as value.

Musical experience, then, is affectively charged from the outset. The patterns we hear are not neutral: they are sensed as tensions, releases, attractions, dissonances, pulses. These patterns entrain affective states, mobilising the listener’s attentional and embodied resources. Emotion, in this light, is not simply a product of meaning—it is a pathway through which meaning becomes lived.

This is why musical experience is not always easy to explain, but deeply easy to feel. A particular motif, a shift in harmony, a sudden silence—these can provoke affective responses that resonate across cultural boundaries, while also being deeply shaped by cultural and personal histories. Emotion is the medium through which music enters us, and through which we enter into music.

In the posts to come, we will explore this medium in more detail. How do affect and emotion organise our musical attention? How are affective resonances shaped by cultural fields and social formations? And how might the affective dimension of music offer new ways of understanding subjectivity, community, and value?

But we begin here, with a simple claim: when we feel music, we are not being distracted from its meaning. We are in the very midst of it.

2 The Affective Architecture of Listening

When we listen to music, we do not simply receive a sequence of sounds—we enter into an affective world. This world is structured, but not in the manner of syntax or grammar. It is structured as a landscape of feeling: peaks of tension, valleys of release, pathways of anticipation and satisfaction. It is this architecture that enables music to move us—not metaphorically, but literally and physiologically.

Affect functions as a mode of readiness. In listening, we are attuned not just to what is present but to what is about to unfold. Our nervous systems prime themselves, our bodies lean forward, our attention pulses in synchrony with the music’s temporal dynamics. This affective entrainment is not external to cognition—it is the condition of meaningful experience. It is how music becomes something we can follow, feel, and care about.

Drawing on Edelman’s neurobiological model, we can understand this readiness as grounded in value-based selection. The neural systems that shape perception are continuously modulated by affective feedback: what we have valued in the past tunes what we can perceive in the present. In musical listening, then, our histories of feeling—personal, social, cultural—shape the pathways along which music moves us.

This is why the same musical phrase can be heard as nostalgic in one context, unsettling in another. The affective architecture of listening is not static; it is a flexible system of embodied expectations, learned dispositions, and emergent resonances. It is shaped by the interplay between an individual’s neurophysiological readiness and the collective value-fields within which their listening is embedded.

Emotion, in this sense, is not a simple reaction. It is an active orientation toward what matters—an evaluation of salience that is bodily, pre-reflective, and dynamic. And music is particularly adept at engaging this evaluative capacity. Through rhythm, contour, texture, and form, music gives shape to patterns of felt significance. It is a medium for the actualisation of affective potential.

This is not to say that all emotion in music is intense or dramatic. Often, the most powerful affective experiences are subtle: a shift in timbre, a harmonic inflection, a breath of silence. These micro-events reorganise the listener’s state—recalibrating bodily tension, reorienting attention, and reshaping the contour of feeling.

What emerges from this view is a deeper appreciation of music’s affective intelligence. Music is not about emotion in the way a narrative is about a plot. Rather, it is through emotion that music does its most important work: aligning bodies, modulating attention, coalescing value. It does not just represent feeling—it organises it.

In the next post, we will explore how this organisation of affect connects to broader cultural and social dynamics. For affect is not only individual—it is also historical, shared, and political.

3 Shared Feeling, Cultural Memory

If music organises affect, then it also participates in a wider terrain: the shared histories of feeling that shape communities, traditions, and cultures. Musical practices are not merely expressive; they are affective technologies, scaffolding collective memory, shaping modes of attention, and reproducing ways of feeling in the world.

When a song becomes emblematic for a social group—whether a national anthem, a protest chant, or a family lullaby—it carries more than melody or lyrics. It carries an affective history, sedimented through repetition, participation, and situated meaning. These accumulated resonances are not fixed; they are re-enacted each time the song is performed or recalled. And in that re-enactment, a value-field is activated: a domain of co-feeling through which listeners are drawn into a shared orientation.

This collective resonance is not abstract. It is embodied in the listener. A rhythmic pulse entrains the body; a familiar tonal inflection evokes a smile or a tear. These embodied responses are not merely personal—they are shaped by social learning and cultural participation. Music, in this sense, carries a social body—an intercorporeal inheritance that binds individuals through patterns of affective experience.

Edelman’s model helps us see how this inheritance works biologically: value systems are shaped by selection. The affective experiences we share, rehearse, and return to become embedded in our perceptual and emotional repertoires. Over time, they tune what we find salient, what we seek out, and what we feel ready to experience. In a social field, this means that certain musical forms become attractors of value: they gather affective energy, organise shared meaning, and orient attention in culturally specific ways.

Importantly, this does not imply that all listeners respond identically. Rather, it suggests that listeners participate in a negotiated landscape of affective possibilities—a shared but dynamic field in which individual experience is shaped by collective resonance, and collective resonance is continually reshaped by individual experience.

This interplay is most apparent in ritual and ceremonial contexts, where music guides transitions, marks boundaries, and intensifies group cohesion. But it is equally present in the everyday: a pop song on the radio, a film score, a theme tune from childhood. These musical events resonate because they are woven into the affective life of the group—and the body of the listener is the site where that resonance becomes real.

Thus, music does not simply evoke emotion; it transacts in shared feeling. It mediates between memory and presence, between the individual and the collective, between embodied experience and cultural history. It is through this affective transaction that music sustains its place in human life—not as background or entertainment, but as a force of orientation and cohesion.

In the next post, we will examine how this affective power of music connects with evolutionary perspectives—asking how the capacity to share feeling through music may have emerged, and why it matters for our species.

4 Music and the Evolution of Affect

Why do humans make music? And why does music move us?

These questions, often asked in wonder, invite us to consider not only the cultural significance of music, but also its evolutionary roots. While evolutionary biology cannot tell us why a particular song feels meaningful, it can help us understand how the human capacity to be moved by music may have emerged as part of our evolutionary inheritance.

From an evolutionary standpoint, emotion is not an ornament. It is a functional system for valuing experience—for assessing what matters, when to act, and how to survive. Emotions shape perception, motivate behaviour, and coordinate social life. And music, we suggest, evolved as a technology of emotional coordination—a material practice through which groups could attune, align, and cohere.

This aligns with the model of value-based selection proposed by Edelman. Emotional systems do not operate in isolation from perception and action—they are entwined in a value-category architecture, shaping how experience is categorised, evaluated, and remembered. In this model, music engages value systems directly, entraining perceptual categories and emotional salience simultaneously.

Rhythm is a good example. Entrainment to a shared pulse enables coordinated movement, such as walking, working, or dancing in time. Such coordination strengthens social bonds, synchronises attention, and generates a feeling of togetherness. Over evolutionary time, such synchrony may have contributed to group cohesion, enhancing survival and cooperation.

Similarly, pitch and melody may have emerged from the prosodic contours of speech—the rise and fall of intonation that conveys emotion before words do. These contours help infants bond with caregivers, conveying warmth, excitement, reassurance, or warning. Music, in this view, extends the prosodic-emotional matrix into more complex forms, capable of expressing and amplifying feeling across time and space.

Importantly, this evolutionary view does not reduce music to biology. Rather, it helps us see how music has become a specialised site for affective elaboration—one that draws on biological capacities, but develops them through cultural forms. Music allows us to simulate emotional trajectories, explore unfamiliar affective states, and revisit shared feelings in new contexts. It is a form of emotional play, and a medium for social transmission of affective knowledge.

This helps explain why music feels both deeply personal and profoundly collective. It is personal because it engages the embodied systems through which each listener experiences value. But it is collective because it evolved in and through social interaction—as a means of sharing attention, feeling, and orientation.

In the next and final post in this series, we’ll reflect on what this convergence of biology, culture, and affect suggests for understanding music’s role in human life—not just as a source of pleasure, but as a binding force in the social world.

5 Music, Meaning, and the Social Life of Feeling

If music activates embodied systems of value—if it entrains perception, stirs emotion, and aligns experience—then its significance cannot be reduced to aesthetic enjoyment alone. Music becomes a medium of social orientation, a way of living meaningfully with others in a shared world.

What, then, is the nature of this meaningfulness?

In our account, musical meaning is not referential: it does not point to things, as language does. Nor is it symbolic in the way a traffic light or religious icon might be. Instead, music is affective meaning-in-motion—a patterning of felt change over time, resonating within and between bodies. It is a form of enacted orientation: a way of being moved, together.

This kind of meaning is not fixed. It emerges in the unfolding moment, shaped by individual histories of value and collective fields of resonance. A single phrase of music may evoke longing in one listener, triumph in another, serenity in a third—depending on their histories of musical experience, the coalescence of value-activation in their bodies, and the social frames through which they interpret what they hear.

Yet across this variation, music plays a remarkably consistent role: it enables the coordinated transformation of affect. Whether in a ceremonial chant, a protest song, a club track, or a lullaby, music invites bodies to attune to shared rhythms, modulations, and intensities. It reorients the individual to the group, the now to what comes next, the body to its felt place in the world.

This is not incidental. Music’s capacity to shape time and feeling makes it a technology of social becoming. It helps individuals locate themselves in collective life—through cultural rituals, shared genres, group affiliations, or aesthetic traditions. And it provides a site for negotiating what it means to feel, to matter, and to belong.

Such a view has implications for education, therapy, cultural practice, and social cohesion. It suggests that music is not merely expressive but constitutive: it makes possible new ways of being-in-relation. And it highlights why the arts matter—not only as vehicles of creativity, but as infrastructures of collective sense-making.

In sum, music does not carry pre-formed meanings. It actualises value in and through the act of listening. It moves us not because of what it represents, but because of what it activates—in our bodies, in our histories, and in our shared world.

Coda: Feeling, Form, and the Social Life of Music

Across this series, we’ve explored how music moves through and with us—not as an abstract code, nor as a set of external symbols, but as a medium that actualises value in embodied, affective experience.

We began by shifting the focus from music’s structure to its impact: how sound activates systems of feeling and orients listeners toward patterns of lived significance. We examined how emotions are not simply expressed through music but are dynamically modulated by it—entraining perception, synchronising bodies, and coalescing meaning in motion.

This affective movement, we’ve argued, does not reside in the music alone. It emerges in the interplay between sound, body, and history—shaped by systems of value selected across lifetimes and generations. It is in this relational unfolding that music becomes meaningful, not as representation but as felt orientation.

Throughout, we’ve resisted the temptation to universalise or essentialise music’s emotional effects. Instead, we’ve shown how musical experience is always situated: in particular bodies, cultural contexts, and collective fields of resonance. Yet even amid this specificity, music’s role as a social technology of feeling remains profound. It brings value into motion. It helps us become attuned—to ourselves, to each other, and to the affective texture of shared life.

In a time when feeling is often commodified or overwhelmed—flattened by algorithms or polarised by discourse—music offers something else. It offers space for subtlety, for resonance, for the co-creation of meaning without prescription. It invites us not just to feel, but to feel with.

And that, perhaps, is where music’s deepest promise lies—not in its ability to express what we already know, but in its capacity to make possible what we have not yet lived.

The Genesis of Value: From Biological Systems to Cultural Fields

 1 Before Meaning: Value as Biological Orientation

Why do we move toward some things and not others? Why do certain sights, sounds, or movements feel good — or right — even before we have words for them? Long before language, reason, or culture, living organisms evolved systems that orient them within their environments. These systems are not neutral: they are suffused with value. Value, in this view, is not something added to perception — it is the very basis of how perception works in biological systems.

In this opening post, we trace the concept of value as it appears not in philosophy or economics, but in biology — especially in the theory of Gerald Edelman. According to Edelman’s Theory of Neuronal Group Selection, perception and action emerge from the ongoing selection and reinforcement of neuronal patterns that have proved useful to the organism. But crucially, this selection is not random. It is steered by what Edelman calls value-category systems: neural systems that distinguish between more and less favourable outcomes and reinforce those that promote survival or coherence.

These systems — including the hypothalamus, brainstem, and limbic structures — assign valence (positive or negative value) to patterns of sensory input. In doing so, they generate the orientation of the organism toward or away from certain possibilities. Importantly, this happens before conscious thought, conceptual reasoning, or linguistic categorisation. The organism does not need to know that something is “food” or “danger” in order to act; its value systems have already made the call.

This means that value is not simply a judgement made after an event, nor merely a cultural construction. It is biological orientation in action — the very condition for responsiveness and adaptation. In this model, consciousness is not detached from value but saturated with it: to perceive is already to lean toward or away.

We might call this kind of value pre-semantic, or even proto-experiential. It is not yet “meaning” in the semiotic sense — but it is the ground from which meaning can later be shaped. A baby turning toward a human face, a bird leaning into a particular pitch contour, or a listener drawn into the groove of a beat — all these are movements of value-orientation, long before explicit interpretation arises.

In this post, then, we begin with the biological genesis of value — its function in orienting living systems within fields of possibility. Later posts will build toward cultural, social, and symbolic elaborations. But here we stay close to the biological ground: value as the dynamic force that bends attention, sensation, and action toward what matters — even before we can say what that is.

2 From Valence to Pattern: The Rise of Embodied Meaningfulness

In the biological view we explored in Post 1, value is not an add-on to perception — it is a condition for perception. But how do these raw tendencies toward or away from stimuli begin to give rise to patterns that feel coherent, meaningful, or even expressive?

The transition begins with the coalescence of valenced perception into recurrent, embodied patterns. These are not yet signs or symbols. Rather, they are dynamically stabilised experiences — sensory-motor routines that are repeated, reinforced, and shaped by the organism’s interactions with the world. In Edelman’s model, these patterns emerge through a process of reentrant signalling: multiple neural maps feeding back into each other in complex loops, shaping what is perceived and how it is felt.

Over time, the organism develops what we might call value-attractors — clusters of perceptual-motor activity that carry a strong orientation toward survival, coherence, or reward. These attractors do not represent external objects in a fixed sense. Instead, they are dynamic regions in the field of possibility toward which the system is drawn again and again. They are felt as meaningful, even though no symbolic interpretation is yet involved.

This is the basis of embodied meaningfulness. The feeling of wholeness, stability, or rightness that can arise in the body — whether in movement, sound, or touch — stems from the convergence of perception and value. For example, a rhythm that entrains bodily movement may feel “good” not because it refers to something else, but because it stabilises and enhances sensorimotor coherence. The body leans in.

What we are describing here is a transition: from raw biological valence to patterned responsiveness — from pure orientation to the beginnings of recognition. These recognitions are not yet reflective or linguistic. They are felt gestalts, rooted in the body and shaped by repeated experience. In this sense, we might say that value precedes meaning, but prepares the ground for it.

Importantly, these embodied patterns can begin to spread socially. Infants do not learn to dance or sing by logic — they are drawn into patterned interactions that feel right or satisfying in shared time. Through these interactions, early value-attractors become interpersonal: coalescing into rituals, games, motifs, and eventually, traditions.

As the posts in this series unfold, we will see how these bodily attractors — forged in the crucible of biological value — provide the substrate upon which social and cultural fields build. For now, we remain with the body, where feeling and movement converge in the early formation of what we might call proto-cultural meaning — the value-laden shapes that make sense even before we can say why.

3 Emergent Fields: From Individuals to Collective Attractors

In the previous post, we considered how embodied patterns of value can stabilise within an organism as attractors — recurring configurations of perception and action that feel meaningful from the inside. But how do these individual attractors begin to take on collective form? How do they become part of a shared cultural world?

The transition depends on a key relational mechanism: resonance. When two or more individuals engage in temporally coordinated interaction — rhythmic, gestural, vocal, or affective — their individual systems of embodied meaningfulness can begin to entrain with one another. This co-entrainment allows certain value-attractors to become interpersonally reinforced. A movement or sound that stabilises one person’s sense of coherence may begin to do so for another — not because of inherent properties, but because of the shared dynamics of interaction.

Over time, these mutual stabilisations can grow into collective value-attractors: recurrent patterns of behaviour, sound, or movement that carry shared affective orientation. Importantly, these attractors do not merely live within individuals. They take on a kind of distributed existence — sustained and reproduced through social practices. We might think of them as fields of embodied resonance that guide and organise participation.

This is not metaphorical. In a relational ontology, we do not treat individuals and collectives as separate layers, but as mutually conditioning processes. The stabilisation of a shared rhythm in a musical performance, for example, is not reducible to each person’s internal state. It is a relational event: a real-time negotiation of timing, tension, and flow that depends on mutual responsiveness. When such events recur, they form attractors in the social field.

These attractors are not static or rigid. They are dynamically maintained — always vulnerable to disruption, always capable of transformation. Yet when they persist, they shape the orientational readiness of future participants. A child raised in a musical tradition does not simply learn about rhythms — their body becomes attuned to the attractors of the field. These become part of what feels natural, meaningful, or emotionally salient.

In this way, collective value-attractors form the pre-semiotic substrate of culture. They are not yet conceptual or symbolic, but they structure how people move, listen, respond, and engage. They are embodied social habits, but more than habits: they are resonant fields of value, binding individuals into patterned participation.

As we move toward the next post, we will consider how these fields begin to shape not just behaviour, but identity. That is, we will ask how belonging to a field of shared value-attractors can begin to coalesce into a felt sense of who one is — a social self, shaped by the gravitational pull of collective resonance.

4 Becoming Someone: Identity as Fielded Resonance

We’ve seen how shared fields of embodied resonance emerge through co-entrained interaction — forming collective attractors of value that orient perception and action. But these fields do more than stabilise social behaviour. Over time, they begin to shape the very structure of subjectivity. That is, they participate in the genesis of identity.

From a relational standpoint, identity is not a fixed inner core, nor a private essence waiting to be expressed. It is a patterned participation in value-fields. We become who we are through selective resonance with the attractors that circulate in our social environment. These attractors may take the form of musical styles, bodily postures, forms of address, affective rhythms, or modes of attention. To identify with them is not to think about them — it is to be pulled toward their gravitational centre, to be drawn into their dynamics, to experience them as self-congruent.

Consider, for example, how a young person encountering a musical genre might feel an intense affective alignment: a sense of being seen, recognised, or expressed. This alignment is not imposed from outside, nor is it merely projected from within. It is co-emergent: a convergence between the embodied attractors of the listener and those sedimented in the musical field. In this moment, music does not just express identity — it activates and organises it.

Over time, repeated exposure to a field of resonance fosters a kind of orientational sharpening. The individual becomes increasingly attuned to the subtle cues and affordances of the field: its timing, its tensions, its values. This attunement enables participation in collective practices, which in turn further consolidate the identity-attractors. Identity, in this view, is a trajectory through resonant space — a history of alignment and differentiation across intersecting value-fields.

Importantly, these fields are not homogeneous. They carry within them gradients of value, tensions, and divergences. An individual’s orientation within the field is not neutral: it reflects a positioning in relation to the field’s structure — what it valorises, marginalises, or renders invisible. Thus, every identity carries an echo of the social field’s hierarchies and exclusions. To resonate with one field may entail dissonance with another. The multiplicity of social attractors means that identity is always partially distributed, partially unstable, always becoming.

In this view, music can play a profound role in reflexive individuation: not only shaping who we become, but helping us sense how we are becoming. The emotional charge of musical experience arises in part because it makes felt the pull of value-fields — their promise of belonging, their weight of expectation, their potential for transformation. In moments of musical intensity, we may glimpse ourselves in formation — not as fixed entities, but as participants in resonant emergence.

In the next and final post of the series, we will consider how this resonant emergence opens a space for transformation — both personal and collective — as individuals and communities seek new alignments, forge new attractors, and reconfigure the value-fields that shape their lives.

5 Reconfiguring the Field: Value, Transformation, and Creative Emergence

Throughout this series, we’ve traced how value emerges from embodied systems, sediments in cultural attractors, and finds expression through collective resonance. We’ve seen how shared fields of value do not simply reflect our identities but participate in shaping them, through patterns of co-entrainment that orient action and perception. But if value fields stabilise who we become, how is transformation possible? Can the field be reconfigured?

To answer this, we must return to the dynamism at the heart of resonance. Value is not a fixed content but a relational patterning — an attractor shaped by the embodied readiness of participants and the structure of their interaction. If the relational conditions shift, so too can the attractors. Transformation, then, becomes possible when new patterns of resonance emerge, drawing participants into different alignments, making available new orientations, new valuations, and new ways of becoming.

This kind of transformation is not imposed from outside the system. It is seeded within the field, often through a local perturbation: an aesthetic innovation, a gesture of refusal, a rupture in expectation, a moment of unexpected intensity. When such a perturbation coalesces into an attractor — when it entrains embodied attention and finds sufficient resonance with others — it can begin to reconfigure the contours of the field itself.

Music plays a special role in this process. Because it condenses value into temporal, affective form, music can act as a carrier wave for change. It can articulate unspoken tensions, conjure emergent possibilities, and prefigure alignments not yet sedimented in the broader social field. This is why marginalised groups have often turned to music — not just to express their experience, but to reshape the field in which their experience becomes visible, thinkable, or liveable.

Yet transformation does not only occur at moments of rupture. It can also unfold slowly, through a cumulative re-weighting of attractors: new forms of attention, different ways of moving together, altered distributions of intensity. A shift in tempo, a change in instrumentation, a subtle revaluation of what is considered meaningful — each of these can, over time, alter the field’s dynamics. In this way, transformation is not an external event but a process of resonant drift.

Such drift may lead to emergent coherence — a new stabilisation of shared value — or it may introduce instability, dissonance, fragmentation. In either case, the field becomes a site of possibility. Participants are not merely located within it; they are agents of its ongoing co-constitution. Through their orientations and actions, they can sustain, resist, or redirect the forces that shape collective life.

To speak of transformation, then, is not to invoke a heroic subject who overcomes the field, but to acknowledge the field’s generative plasticity — its capacity to be moved by its own tensions. Music, in particular, reveals this plasticity with acute clarity. It is both a map and a motor of value: a way of tracing how we have resonated, and a means of drawing new resonances into being.

In closing, the genesis of value is not a story of fixed norms or given structures. It is a story of living systems in relation, of fields that feel, and of attractors that evolve through the very lives they organise. To participate in such a field is to become part of its movement — not simply to inherit meaning, but to co-create the conditions under which meaning becomes possible.

Reflective Coda: Living in the Field of Value

In tracing the genesis of value, we have moved from the embodied dynamics of neural selection and affective attunement to the expansive architectures of culture, tradition, and shared resonance. At every stage, what has emerged is a view of value not as a fixed property of objects or acts, but as a relational configuration — a field effect, enacted by living systems whose orientations are shaped through interaction.

This reframing brings with it a distinctive kind of realism: a realism of embeddedness and co-constitution. Value is not “out there” to be discovered, nor “in here” to be projected. It is the shape taken by resonance within a given field of life — a field that includes our bodies, our practices, our histories, and the affordances of our environment. To live is to be oriented by such fields, even as we contribute to their ongoing transformation.

Music, in this view, is more than a cultural artefact or expressive form. It is one of the most sensitive instruments for tuning the field of value — for making patterns of resonance felt, for drawing forth the weight and contour of what matters, and for opening the space in which new patterns might arise. When people make music, move to it, or feel themselves moved by it, they are participating in an unfolding that exceeds any individual: a coalescence of embodied meaningfulness that both draws on and reshapes the collective ground.

In a world where value fields are increasingly fractured — where global circuits of mediation reconfigure our perceptual lives at unprecedented speeds — the capacity to feel, trace, and modulate resonance has never been more vital. It offers not a blueprint for consensus, but a means of orientation: a way to navigate shifting terrains, to sustain connection across difference, and to remain open to transformation.

This is the ethical horizon of the model we have sketched. It asks not only how value arises, but how we live with it: how we sustain it, how we contest it, and how we remain attuned to its emergence. It invites us to listen — not just to music, but to the fields we inhabit — and to become more conscious agents of their ongoing composition.

Music as Social Process: Collective Resonance and Identity

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.