1 The Material Mediation of Music
Music is not just sound — it is sound shaped, carried, and transformed through technologies. From traditional instruments to microphones, recording studios, and streaming platforms, these material forms mediate how music is made, shared, and experienced. But mediation is not simply a technical matter. It reshapes the social system of music by influencing how sounds function as values for listeners and participants.
In the relational ontology that guides our understanding, music exists as a system of social-material phenomena: sounds produced by makers that resonate with listeners’ value systems. Technology extends and transforms these phenomena, changing the scale, accessibility, and temporality of music’s social life.
Consider the electric guitar, which not only alters the physical sound but also expands the expressive possibilities of performance and the social identities tied to its sound. Or streaming platforms, which reorganise how music circulates, how communities form around music, and how value accrues differently from the era of physical records.
Thus, technology mediates not only the sounds themselves, but also the patterns of interaction and the temporal flow of music’s social functioning. This mediation reconfigures how listeners perceive value and how music makers instantiate sounds that activate that value.
In the next posts, we will explore how this mediation operates in detail, how it transforms social functioning and value potential, and what this means for the evolving ontology of music today.
2 Temporal and Spatial Transformations in Music Mediation
Technology doesn’t just change the sounds we hear — it also reshapes how music unfolds through time and space.
Before digital mediation, music was usually experienced live or via fixed physical media, such as vinyl records or CDs. These formats limited when, where, and how people could engage with music. The music existed in specific places and times: concerts, radio broadcasts, or the home stereo.
Now, streaming services, digital files, and mobile devices allow music to be ubiquitous and on-demand. This alters music’s temporal flow — listeners can pause, repeat, or skip at will. Music’s social functioning becomes less tied to shared, collective moments and more dispersed across individual experiences. Yet, paradoxically, technology also enables new forms of collective engagement through online communities and live streams.
Spatially, music is no longer confined to physical venues or localities. It circulates globally, often instantaneously. This expands the scale of music’s social system and the diversity of its value potentials, as sounds from one culture can resonate widely in others, sometimes creating new hybrid values.
These temporal and spatial transformations reveal how technology mediates music’s unfolding processes in relational time — not just as sequences of sound, but as social phenomena that activate value across different times and places.
Our next post will examine the role of embodiment in technologically mediated music experience, and how bodily engagement persists and adapts in these changing contexts.
3 Embodiment in the Age of Music Technology
Even as music moves freely through digital networks and reaches us on tiny screens or earbuds, our bodies remain central to how we experience it.
Embodiment means that music perception is grounded in our bodily sensations — the vibrations we feel, the movements we make, the rhythms that sync with our heartbeats and breath. This lived, physical engagement is not erased by technology; instead, it adapts and transforms.
Consider how headphones bring music directly into the ear canal, creating an intimate, focused bodily experience. Or how dance floors and festivals — even those streamed online — still evoke shared physical responses, from tapping feet to full-body dancing. Technology reshapes the environment but does not replace the body as the site of music’s value activation.
Moreover, emerging technologies like haptic feedback devices, virtual reality, and immersive audio further extend how the body participates. These tools can simulate or enhance physical sensations, deepening the embodied connection to music.
Understanding embodiment in mediated music experience reminds us that music is not just sound — it is a bodily, temporal, and social process. Technology modifies the medium, but the fundamental relational process of activating value through embodied perception continues.
In the next post, we will explore how music technology influences the social dimensions of music — how it shapes collective resonance and identity in a digitally connected world.
4 Technology, Social Resonance, and Music’s Changing Landscape
Technology doesn’t just change how we hear music — it transforms how we share it and how music functions socially.
Before digital media, music’s social power relied largely on live, co-present experiences — concerts, dances, gatherings. These events created powerful moments of collective resonance, where bodies moved, felt, and valued together in real time.
Today, digital platforms like streaming services, social media, and virtual concerts have extended music’s reach far beyond physical presence. Music circulates globally, connecting listeners across space and time. But what does this mean for music’s social function?
While the shared physicality of live events may diminish in some contexts, new forms of collective resonance emerge. Online communities coalesce around shared tastes, values, and identities, often expressed through playlists, comments, and shared videos. Music becomes a social glue that binds people not through co-location, but through shared value activation in diverse environments.
Technology also enables novel participatory practices — remixing, sampling, collaborative online creation — which shift agency from traditional music makers to distributed networks of listeners and creators. This decentralization expands who can participate in shaping music’s social meanings and values.
Yet, despite technological mediation, the fundamental process remains: music functions by activating patterns of value in listeners’ perceptual and affective systems, fostering resonance at both individual and collective levels.
In our next post, we’ll delve deeper into the emotional and neurobiological dimensions of this value activation and how they relate to music’s affective power.
5 Affective Dimensions: Value, Emotion, and Music
Music’s power often feels emotional — joy, sadness, excitement, nostalgia — but what underlies this emotional impact?
At its core, music activates value systems within listeners, which are deeply tied to neurobiological processes that govern emotions. These value systems evolved to help organisms select adaptive behaviours and social bonds. In humans, these systems are richly layered, shaped by both biology and culture.
When we listen to music, our perceptual systems entrain with patterns of sound that resonate with these value systems. This resonance triggers emotional responses that are not simply “meanings” but embodied experiences of value—what feels good, safe, significant, or energising.
Neuroscientific studies show music engages brain areas involved in reward, motivation, and social bonding, such as the ventral striatum and limbic system. These areas mediate pleasure and emotional salience, explaining why music can evoke powerful feelings even without explicit semantic content.
From a relational ontology perspective, this emotional activation unfolds in time as music moves through processes and moments, dynamically shaping the listener’s state of consciousness. The affective experience is both immediate and socially embedded, connecting individual emotions to collective identity and shared cultural values.
Understanding music’s affective dimension helps us appreciate why music matters not only as sound but as a force shaping human experience, social cohesion, and cultural evolution.
In our final post of this series, we’ll explore how music technology further mediates and transforms these affective and social dynamics.
6 Music Technology and Relational Ontology
Music has always been shaped by the tools and technologies used to create, distribute, and experience it. From early instruments to modern digital platforms, technology fundamentally transforms how music is made and how it functions socially.
At the material level, new technologies enable novel sound phenomena—new timbres, textures, spatial effects—that expand the material potential available to music makers. These innovations provide fresh resources for creating patterns that can activate value in listeners.
Technological mediation also reshapes the social dimension of music. Recorded sound, broadcasting, streaming, and interactive media change how listeners engage with music, how shared value is constructed, and how collective resonance forms across time and space.
From a relational ontology standpoint, technology alters the unfolding processes by which music activates value. It influences the temporal structure of music’s experience, enabling asynchronous listening, remixing, and global circulation, which transform the dynamics of collective identity and cultural meaning.
These transformations highlight the co-constitutive relationship between music, technology, and social systems. Rather than viewing technology as a mere conduit, we see it as an active participant shaping music’s social-material instantiation and value potential.
By grounding these reflections in relational ontology, we gain a richer understanding of music’s evolving role in human experience—how it continuously unfolds in time, mediates social relations, and engages embodied value systems.
Reflective Coda: Towards a Relational Understanding of Music
This series has explored music as a dynamic, unfolding social-material phenomenon that cannot be reduced to language or fixed meaning. We began by distinguishing the roles of music makers and listeners, clarifying how music activates value through perceptual resonance rather than semantic meaning.
Building on this foundation, we examined embodiment as the lived ground of music perception, where bodily engagement shapes experience. We then deepened our view of music in time, recognising the unfolding processes that make musical experience uniquely temporal and processual.
Expanding from the individual to the collective, we saw how music functions socially to construct shared resonance and identity, intertwining personal and intersubjective value. We considered affective dimensions, linking value activation to emotion and neurobiological processes, and thereby connecting music to evolutionary and cultural dynamics.
Finally, we reflected on how technological mediation transforms music’s social-material instantiation, enabling new modes of creation, circulation, and engagement that reshape its social functions and value potential.
Throughout, relational ontology has offered a coherent lens—one attentive to the unfolding processes of time, the embodiment of perception, and the inseparability of material and social dimensions. This approach opens rich avenues for further inquiry into how music continually emerges, changes, and resonates within human experience.
As music and technology evolve, as social relations shift, and as embodied listeners continue to engage, this relational perspective invites ongoing exploration of music’s dynamic place in our world.