Showing posts with label fractal. Show all posts

12 August 2025

The Relational Grammar of the Universe

1 Tension and Complementarity

In previous series, we followed two trajectories in the unfolding of the universe: one through energy and entropy, tracing the great expansion and thinning of time; the other through mass and inertia, tracing the local resistance to that unfolding—the contraction of space and the thickening of duration.

These arcs revealed striking symmetries. Where energy made time run faster, mass slowed it down. Where entropy stretched space, gravity contracted it. One pointed to the future of the universe, the other to its form. Yet both told a single story, not of opposites, but of complementary tendencies.

In this new series, we take a step further. We ask:

What lies beneath these patterns?

Is there a structure deeper than entropy or inertia, space or time?

We propose that there is. That what the universe expresses—across cosmological and local scales, across physics and experience—is a small number of relational principles, repeated in various guises. Not laws of nature in the classical sense, but grammatical principles: conditions under which meaningful unfolding becomes possible.

And the first principle is this:

Every unfolding enacts its own resistance.
Every differentiation arises through tension.

This is not a claim about objects or particles. It is a claim about relation—that whenever something becomes, it becomes within a field that holds it. Time unfolds not in isolation but in relation to space; energy unfolds not without mass, but with the possibility of inertia. Even entropy, that thinning of temporal potential, occurs only because something—mass, structure, memory—offers resistance.

This tension is not a flaw in the system. It is the system.

It is how the universe generates meaningful structure, instead of dissolving into flat uniformity or collapsing into a singularity. It is how difference comes to be, and how that difference can persist.

In this grammar, complementarity is not opposition.

Energy and mass are not two kinds of stuff; they are perspectives within a relational field—tendencies toward unfolding and holding.
Time and space are not containers; they are relational dimensions—one tracing the unfolding of process, the other tracing its co-presence with others.

Each depends on the other. Each defines itself by what it is not. And their tension is what allows the universe to be more than a pulse or a point.

In the posts to come, we will explore how this tension—

unfolds across different scales,
structures both physics and meaning,
and ultimately, may provide a relational grammar through which the universe expresses itself.

A grammar not of language, but of becoming.

2 Generative Tension

In the first post of this series, we proposed that the universe unfolds not from substance, but from tension—from the dynamic interplay of complementary tendencies like energy and mass, space and time, entropy and inertia. These are not opposing forces, but relational poles that bring each other into being. Each enacts a resistance to the other—and in that resistance, something new becomes possible.

In this post, we turn more directly to the nature of that tension, and how it is not merely a condition of the universe’s existence, but the engine of its differentiation.

Tension is Not Conflict

It’s tempting to imagine tension as conflict—as if entropy is trying to tear the universe apart, while gravity fights to hold it together. But in a relational ontology, this framing misses the point. Neither entropy nor gravity exists in isolation. Rather, they emerge together, in a system where one unfolds because the other resists.

Think of it like breath:

Inhalation draws in potential.
Exhalation releases it.
Neither is the goal. The dynamic between them is the life.

So too with the cosmos. The tension between thinning and thickening, between dispersal and persistence, is not a battle—it is a relational rhythm. And that rhythm is what gives rise to structure, change, and meaning.

Tension Generates Differentiation

If the universe were pure entropy—perfect dispersion—it would be featureless. If it were pure mass—complete inertia—it would be frozen. Neither possibility allows for unfolding, because neither contains difference.

But when entropy and mass co-arise, they create the conditions for differentiation:

Energy spreads, but not evenly—because mass curves geodesics.
Time accelerates, but not uniformly—because mass slows it locally.
Space expands, but not symmetrically—because gravitational relations reshape it.

This means that tension is not a blockage—it is creative.

It generates difference—not as a subtraction from unity, but as a condition for structure. In this grammar, difference is not deviation from sameness, but an articulation of relation.

Process, Not Substance

To see tension this way is to shift from thinking in terms of things to thinking in terms of processes. A process unfolds within a relational field—an interplay of tendencies that co-define what the process is, and what it can become.

A star is not a substance; it is a dynamic equilibrium between nuclear expansion and gravitational contraction.

A black hole is not an object; it is a relational threshold, where the contraction of space outruns the capacity of time to unfold.

This is what makes tension generative:

It doesn’t merely balance—it produces structure by creating the conditions under which unfolding becomes possible.

A Universe of Held Becoming

In this view, the universe is not made of matter, nor governed by immutable laws. It is a held becoming—a relational field in which each process finds its form through the tension that holds it open.

This tension is not external to time and space. It is what makes time and space meaningful dimensions, rather than empty containers. It is not a force added to energy or mass—it is what makes their interplay expressive.

In the next post, we will explore how this grammar of held becoming scales, from the expansion of the universe to the gravity of a planet, and perhaps even to the construal of meaning in consciousness.

3 Scaling the Grammar

So far, we’ve proposed that the universe unfolds through generative tension: a grammar of complementary tendencies—unfolding and holding, acceleration and resistance—that co-create difference, form, and meaning. This tension is not an anomaly; it is the fundamental condition of becoming.

But how does this grammar operate across different scales?

From Cosmos to Quanta

At the largest scale, this grammar is visible in the expansion of the universe:

Entropy increases, thinning time.
Space expands, stretching the topology of unfolding.
Energy disperses, reducing potential.

And yet, within this expansion, we find the persistence of form:

Galaxies, stars, planets—localised resistances to entropy.
Black holes—intensifications of mass, slowing time toward stillness.
Memory—traces of pattern and regularity that defy uniformity.

At the smallest scale, in quantum processes, we see the same relational logic:

A particle is not a thing, but a probability field—a potential awaiting instantiation.
Observation instantiates—collapses—a particular value from a field of possible values.
Even here, unfolding is relational, not self-contained.

The grammar of the universe does not change from one scale to another. What changes is how the tension articulates:

At cosmological scales: gravity and entropy.
At quantum scales: indeterminacy and measurement.
At biological and cognitive scales: stability and adaptation, prediction and surprise.

The principle of complementarity is fractal—recurring at every level of complexity.

Local and Global Relational Fields

What we call “local” and “global” are not scales of size, but scales of relation.

A black hole is locally dense, but cosmologically small.
A living cell is microscopically small, but relationally rich.
A human thought is fleeting, yet embedded in systems of language, culture, and memory that scale far beyond the individual.

Each instance is a local expression of a global grammar.

Each scale reveals not a separate world, but a differently curved field of tension.

Scaling Meaning

This brings us to an important observation:

If the same grammar holds across physical, biological, and semiotic domains, then meaning itself is scaled tension.

A clause constrains and unfolds potential meanings.
A musical phrase resolves tension across time.
A memory persists by resisting the entropy of forgetting.

In each case, difference is held open—not erased, not exploded, but maintained in a delicate field of complementarity. Meaning is never just instantiated; it is always relationally patterned, held within a system of resistance and unfolding.

The Grammar is Recursive

This pattern of scaling does not flatten the universe into sameness. Instead, it reveals a recursive logic—a grammar that repeats without replicating.

The same principles:

tension and complementarity,
differentiation and resistance,
local unfolding and global pattern—

—manifest differently at every level. Yet they belong to a single ontology: not a tower of nested substances, but a meshwork of relational unfoldings.

In the next post, we will explore how this recursive grammar supports the universe’s capacity for differentiation—how difference becomes meaningful without being reduced to identity or lost in dispersion.

4 Differentiation Without Identity

If the universe unfolds through relational tension, and if that tension scales from the cosmic to the cognitive, then we are left with a profound question:

What is difference, if not identity in disguise?

In much of Western metaphysics, difference is defined negatively: as not the same. It presupposes identity as primary—a kind of original unity from which everything else deviates. But in a relational ontology, difference is not a departure from identity—it is a pattern of relation. There is no original “same” behind appearances. What we have instead is differentiation without the presumption of a prior, fixed essence.

Relation Before Thing

This reframing begins with a basic commitment: process precedes product. The universe is not a collection of substances that then enter into relation. It is relation all the way down.

A quark is not a particle that happens to relate—it is a relational configuration.
A self is not an entity that enters social interaction—it is socially instantiated.
Even spacetime is not a neutral container—it is constituted by the relations of unfolding processes.

Under these conditions, identity is not the origin of difference. It is a local compression of relational tension—a stabilised pattern that temporarily holds, and can be recognised, named, or measured.

What unfolds from this is a very different view of what it means to be different.

To Differ is to Relate Otherwise

If difference is not deviation, then to differ is not to oppose—it is to relate differently.

The moon differs from the earth not as a separate object, but as a relational structure within a gravitational system.
A dialect differs from a language not in essence, but in a patterned variation shaped by local use.
A single thought differs from another in how it orients unfolding: what it makes possible, what it resists, what potential it configures.

This means difference is situated. It is always specific to a system of unfolding relations—never abstract, never universal. It does not float free of context. It is context, inflected differently.

Held Open

Because difference is not derived from identity, it does not require final resolution. It does not have to “become the same” to be meaningful.

The grammar of the universe allows difference to be held open—tension without collapse, complementarity without fusion.

This is why meaning is possible:

Because time unfolds without repeating.
Because systems respond without assimilating.
Because the relational field is always open to further articulation.

This “held openness” is not indefinite. Processes end. Structures collapse. But for a time—for a meaningful moment—difference can be held without having to be resolved. And this holding is what makes complexity, consciousness, and cosmos alike possible.

Symmetry and Play

This also gives us a deeper understanding of the symmetries we’ve explored in previous series:

Entropy and energy.
Expansion and contraction.
Space and time.
Mass and motion.

These are not oppositions in need of synthesis. They are tensions in play. Each gains definition through its difference from the other. Their symmetry is not static but dynamic—a choreography that allows the universe to unfold without reverting to sameness.

In the next (and final) post, we’ll return to this idea of cosmic choreography and consider what it might mean to speak of the universe as a text—a patterned unfolding that not only holds difference but also makes it meaningful.

5 The Universe as Text

Throughout this series, we've explored the idea that the universe is not made of things, but of relational unfoldings—tensions held in play, processes patterned by complementarity, difference without essence. We’ve seen how the cosmos coheres not by fixing identity, but by enabling differentiation: the dynamic spacing of relation.

Now we come to a final metaphor—not a metaphor of matter, but of meaning:

What if the universe is a kind of text?

Not a message from a transcendent author.

Not a code awaiting decryption.

But a field of patterned unfolding, held open in tension, capable of instantiating difference meaningfully across scales.

Meaning as Relational Pattern

In systemic functional linguistics, a text is not just a string of symbols. It is an actualisation of potential—a configuration of meaning that emerges from and feeds back into a structured system of possibility. Every clause, every word, is chosen from a paradigm, actualising one path through a network of relations.

So too with the universe.

A galaxy instantiates potential paths of gravitational folding.
A star actualises the potential for matter to fuse and shine.
A human life patterns consciousness through language, gesture, relation.

In each case, what exists is not a fixed thing, but a selection within a structured field—an instance that construes and is construed.

This is not to say the universe is language.

But it is to say that language gives us a model of how meaning can emerge from structure, how difference can be held open, and how systems can unfold without collapsing into sameness.

Stratified, Instantiated, Tensed

From this perspective, the universe exhibits the same core principles as semiotic systems:

Stratification: levels of organisation—from quantum fields to biochemical patterns to consciousness.
Instantiation: a cline from potential to instance—each event an actualisation of possible configurations.
Tension: meaning arises not from identity, but from relation—each difference poised against another.

This makes the universe readable—not as a finished book, but as an ongoing text in the making, whose grammar is recursive, whose logic is relational, and whose meaning is never final.

Holding the Text Open

The challenge of reading such a universe is not to discover its fixed truths, but to recognise how it holds itself open—how it resists closure.

Entropy thins time, yet memory persists.
Expansion pulls systems apart, yet new structures arise.
Mass curves geodesics, yet leaves room for motion.

At every level, something resists entropy just enough to hold form, to pattern energy, to instantiate a trace of meaning.

This is not permanence. It is persistence.

A momentary coherence. A fragile unfolding.

The universe is not a closed text, but a held tension—a living grammar of differentiation.

And we, readers among readers, do not merely decode it.

We instantiate it.

Reflective Coda: Reading the Universe

In this series, we have read the universe not as a container of things, but as a grammar of unfolding relations. We have traced how complementarity—between energy and entropy, mass and motion, space and time—gives rise to the structures we observe, the tensions we inhabit, and the meanings we make.

At every scale, the universe shows no allegiance to fixed identity. It does not begin with things that move, but with movement that configures things. It does not begin with sameness, but with differentiation. It does not begin with being, but with relation.

This has implications not only for physics or philosophy, but for how we understand ourselves.

We are not substances with attributes, but traces of relation—brief instantiations of collective potential, held in tension with all that is not-us, shaped by systems we did not author but in which we now write.

To live, in this grammar, is to co-instantiate the universe—to be a clause in a clause complex beyond imagining.

But we are not powerless.

We are not merely read.

We are readers too.

We make meaning—locally, momentarily, with what is given—by choosing how to relate, how to differ, how to hold tension open without collapsing it into certainty.

This is not a minor role. It is the very logic of the cosmos, now folded into us.

So let us read attentively.

Let us write carefully.

And let us remember that in this universe,

to unfold differently is to mean.

12 July 2025

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?

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.

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.

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.