Relational Ontology and the Quantum Field of Meaning

Introduction: Why Quantum Physics Needs a New Ontology

Quantum theory remains the most successful predictive framework in physics — yet its foundations remain unresolved. The famous puzzles of uncertainty, entanglement, and wavefunction collapse have led to decades of interpretive controversy, often centring on the nature of observation and the role of the observer.

At the heart of these puzzles is a deeper problem: the ontology assumed by most interpretations of quantum mechanics. Traditional physical theories often presume a world of objectively existing entities — particles and fields — with properties defined independently of any observer. In such a framework, it becomes paradoxical that an observer’s measurement seems to affect the outcome. How can an electron know whether it is being watched?

This series proposes a shift. Rather than trying to resolve these puzzles within an object-based ontology, we approach them from a different standpoint: a relational ontology grounded in systemic potential, actualisation, and the dynamics of observation. This is not a metaphysical sleight-of-hand or a poetic metaphor. It is a rigorous account of reality as constituted by relations, not things — and by instances, not substances.

Our framework draws on a conception of potential and instance developed through systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and informed by neurobiological theories of consciousness. But it is not restricted to semiotic systems. The same principles can be extended to the material domain — including quantum systems — when we treat potential as structured, and actualisation as relational.

In this series, we will revisit each of the classic interpretive challenges in quantum mechanics through this lens:

1. How should we understand uncertainty when position and momentum are not hidden properties, but mutually exclusive potentials?

2. How can entanglement be seen not as spooky action, but as the co-structured potential of a relational field?

3. What really happens in measurement, when the wavefunction collapses to an outcome?

4. What is the role of the observer, if not a detached subject or external cause?

5. And how does all this relate to the processes of individuation, where systems of potential are differentiated into distinct fields of meaning?

By reframing these questions in a relational ontology, we aim to show that the strangeness of quantum mechanics is not a sign of its incompleteness — but of a mismatch between its insights and the assumptions we bring to its interpretation. When we shift from a substance-based to a relation-based ontology, what once appeared as paradox may instead become intelligible — not as knowledge of what the world is, but as insight into how the world unfolds.

1 Uncertainty and the Structure of Potential

The uncertainty principle is often misinterpreted as a statement about human ignorance — as though the act of measurement disturbs an otherwise well-defined reality. But the principle is more radical than that. It does not say we can’t know both the position and the momentum of a particle. It says they cannot both be actualised in the same instance.

In classical physics, properties such as position and momentum are conceived as attributes that objects possess. But quantum theory reveals that such properties are not always co-instantiable. They belong to different structures of potential, which cannot be simultaneously realised. To actualise one is to foreclose the actualisation of the other.

This suggests that we need to rethink what is meant by a “property.” From the perspective of relational ontology, a property is not a pre-existing thing that a particle carries around with it, but an instance drawn from a system of potential — one that is defined relationally, not absolutely.

The Heisenberg uncertainty relation describes the limit of simultaneous actualisability, not of precision. The wavefunction doesn’t conceal hidden variables; it expresses a structured potential that unfolds into actualities only when particular observational conditions are met. The more tightly constrained the conditions for actualising position, the less coherent the structure remaining for momentum — and vice versa.

This coherence is not noise or deficiency. It is a sign of the system’s internal organisation. A system that can be actualised as a position-instance or as a momentum-instance is not ambiguous — it is structured. But its structure is such that only one actualisation can be instantiated at a time.

On this view, uncertainty is not a flaw in our measurements, nor a result of disturbance. It is a natural consequence of how relational potentials are structured and instantiated. Each observation is a moment of selection — not of selection among equally real outcomes, but of which relation is brought into being as an instance.

The quantum world, then, is not a world of definite objects obscured by probabilistic fog. It is a world of structured potential in which some paths of actualisation are mutually exclusive. Uncertainty is not a veil over reality — it is a window into its relational constitution.

2 Entanglement as Non-Separable Relational Potential

Entanglement is famously described as “spooky action at a distance,” a mysterious link that instantly connects particles across space. Yet this mystique largely arises from our object-centred ontology — the assumption that particles are independent things with intrinsic properties, capable of existing separately and locally.

From a relational ontology perspective, entanglement reveals the fundamental structure of quantum systems as relational fields of potential. The entangled particles do not possess separate, independent states; instead, they jointly instantiate a single, unified system of potential that cannot be decomposed into isolated parts.

When two particles become entangled, their possible states become co-structured — the potential outcomes for one particle are inseparably linked to those of the other. This co-structure forms a holistic field, a relational pattern that transcends classical separability.

Measurement of one particle actualises a particular relation in this field, collapsing the range of potential outcomes for both. Rather than sending a signal or influencing the distant particle, measurement transforms the relational structure as a whole, instantaneously updating what remains to be actualised.

This is not “action at a distance” but the unfolding of a relational potential that is fundamentally non-local and irreducible. The space between particles is not empty but filled with relational meaning and structured potential that cannot be split without losing essential coherence.

Entanglement challenges the classical notion that reality consists of discrete, independently existing entities. Instead, it points toward a deeper reality constituted by relational fields whose parts are defined only through their mutual relations and co-instantiation.

This relational view opens a new way of understanding the quantum world — not as a collection of isolated things but as an interconnected web of potential, where the unity of the system precedes and determines the instantiation of its parts.

3 Measurement as Actualisation, Not Discovery

Measurement in quantum mechanics is often portrayed as a passive act of revealing pre-existing properties of particles. However, this view quickly runs into paradoxes: if properties are not definite until measured, what does it mean to measure? And how can the observer influence what is observed?

The relational ontology reframes measurement not as discovery but as actualisation — the selective instantiation of one among many possible relations within a structured potential.

The quantum wavefunction describes a system’s potential: a structured set of possibilities that exist relationally, not as concrete realities. Measurement is an interaction between the system and a material apparatus (including observer and environment), which together define the conditions under which one particular potential is instantiated as an actual event.

In this sense, measurement is a process — a relational unfolding in which the system’s potential is partially actualised. The outcome is not revealed but generated, through the relational constraints imposed by the measurement context.

This perspective dissolves the paradox of “wavefunction collapse” by seeing it as a transformation of potential into instance, mediated by relational conditions rather than a sudden, mysterious physical event. The wavefunction does not “collapse” like a physical object; it is restructured by actualisation.

Importantly, the apparatus is not a neutral observer but an active participant, providing the relational context that defines what counts as an outcome. Different apparatuses instantiate different aspects of the system’s potential.

Measurement also highlights the context-dependence of quantum phenomena. The actualised property is meaningful only within the relational field that includes the system, the apparatus, and the observer. There is no “property” detached from this context.

In sum, measurement is a creative, relational event — an actualisation of meaning from structured potential — rather than a passive uncovering of hidden facts. It is a moment where possibility becomes reality, shaped by the dynamics of relational fields.

4 The Observer as a Situated Field of Systems

Traditional interpretations often cast the observer as a detached, external subject — a “god’s eye view” perceiving a world of independently existing objects. This perspective struggles to account for the active role of observation in quantum phenomena.

A relational ontology repositions the observer as an embedded, situated system — itself a complex relational field composed of material, semiotic, and cognitive processes. The observer is not outside the system but entwined within it.

Consciousness does not “cause” wavefunction collapse in a mystical sense. Instead, it participates in the actualisation of meaning within relational fields. Observation is a dynamic process in which the observer’s state and the observed system co-define what becomes instantiated.

The observer’s semiotic systems — language, concepts, and sensory apparatus — shape the relational potential, influencing which relations are actualised. Observation thus transforms both the system and the observer, a mutual process of individuation.

This perspective aligns with neurobiological theories that view consciousness as the emergent product of neuronal group selection, where dynamic, selective processes instantiate meaning from potential. The observer’s field is itself a system of potentials and actualisations, resonating with the relational structure of the quantum system.

Rather than a passive watcher, the observer is a participatory agent, whose situatedness and embodiment condition the unfolding of quantum events. Objectivity emerges not from detachment but from the coherence of relational processes shared across observers.

By recognising the observer as a situated field of systems, we bridge the divide between subject and object, and understand observation as a fundamental relational event — a co-actualisation of potential in both system and observer.

5 Rethinking Objectivity, Causality, and Knowledge

Quantum mechanics challenges classical notions of objectivity, causality, and knowledge — concepts often taken for granted in everyday experience. A relational ontology invites us to rethink these ideas in light of structured potential and actualisation.

Objectivity is not about detachment or viewing the world from an external vantage point. Instead, it is about the coherence of relational processes across multiple situated perspectives. When observers share relational fields and contexts, their actualisations align, producing consistent accounts of phenomena. Objectivity, then, emerges from intersubjective resonance, not from observer-independence.

Causality in the quantum realm cannot be understood as simple, linear transmission of influence between independent objects. Instead, causality is the temporal unfolding of relational fields — a co-evolution of potential and instance within systems. The cause-effect relation is embedded in the dynamics of actualisation, where potential relations are instantiated in time.

Knowledge arises not from uncovering pre-existing facts, but from the structured actualisation of potential into meaningful instances. It is an emergent property of relational fields that includes observer, system, and context. Knowledge is inherently contextual and situated, shaped by the conditions of actualisation.

This reframing dissolves classical paradoxes and reveals quantum phenomena as natural expressions of relational reality. Rather than problems to be solved, these challenges become windows into the deeper structure of how reality unfolds.

By embracing a relational ontology, we gain a more coherent, integrated understanding of objectivity, causality, and knowledge — one that honours the dynamic, participatory nature of observation and existence.

6 Individuation and Quantum Fields

Building on our relational ontology, the process of individuation — how entities come to be distinct yet connected — finds a profound expression in the nature of quantum fields.

Quantum fields are not assemblages of isolated particles but fundamental relational structures encompassing all potential instances of particles and their interactions. Each particle is an individuated pattern emerging from the continuous field of potentiality.

Individuation is a process of differentiation within this holistic field, where relational potentials selectively actualise as distinct entities while maintaining their intrinsic connections. The boundaries between particles are not absolute separations but dynamic thresholds within the relational web.

This perspective aligns with the understanding of quantum entanglement as the non-separability of relational potentials, and measurement as the contextual actualisation of individuated instances. It reveals a universe woven from interdependent processes of co-instantiation and co-individuation.

In this light, quantum fields are not mere physical substrates but dynamic landscapes of potential meaning and relation, constantly shaping and reshaping the identities of their constituent parts.

Individuation within quantum fields exemplifies the fundamental relationality of reality — where distinctions arise not from isolation but from the patterned interplay of relational potentials, actualised through measurement, observation, and interaction.

Music and the Materiality of Value: A Relational Ontology

1 The Value of Music: From Neural Bias to Social Resonance

In this series, we propose a new account of music, grounded in a relational ontology that understands reality as composed of processes and potentials. Here, music is not a symbolic or semiotic system — it is not, in itself, a system of signs or meanings. Rather, music is a material system that acts on the listener by activating biological values, shaped over evolutionary time, and given new functions within social roles and settings.

This post lays the foundations for the model by introducing the key distinctions: between material and semiotic systems, between value and emotion, and between the roles of musician and audience.

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Biological Value and the Neural Grounding of Affect

We begin with a basic claim: value is biological before it is social. Following Gerald Edelman's Theory of Neuronal Group Selection, we understand value as a system of inherited neural biases — tendencies for certain neural pathways to be more easily activated due to their adaptive success in evolutionary history. These values are not ‘meanings’ in themselves, but biological potentials for shaping perception and action.

In Edelman’s model, such values guide how attention is allocated, how stimuli are selected or ignored, and how coherence is achieved in neural processes. They are part of the biological infrastructure that makes any kind of consciousness — and eventually meaning — possible.

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Music as a Material System of Value Activation

Music acts directly on this infrastructure. It consists of patterns of sound — rhythm, pitch, timbre, dynamic variation — that, through repetition, tension, surprise, and resonance, can activate neural biases and modulate them over time. These activations instantiate value within the listener’s system. They do not constitute symbols or signs, and they do not convey meaning unless or until consciousness construes them as such — for example, as feelings, moods, or memories.

Thus, music is not a semiotic system like language. It does not rely on arbitrary signs governed by codes. Instead, music belongs to the material order of reality, where potentials are biological and instantiated through physical processes.

We can say that music is material potential, a subtype of social system potential, because the production and reception of music occur within socially differentiated roles: that of musician and audience. The musician organises sound materially; the audience becomes the field in which value is activated and instantiated.

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Value Is Not Emotion

A common confusion in theories of music is the assumption that music expresses or communicates emotion. This assumes a semiotic model. But in our ontology, emotion is not communicated; rather, it is a mental process — a construal of biological value by consciousness.

The music does not carry emotion; it activates value. That value may be construed consciously as emotion, or it may remain at a more bodily, affective level, such as arousal, tension, or a shift in mood. Importantly, the emotion is not in the music, nor is it passed from musician to audience. It emerges in the listener’s system as a mental construal of material activation.

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Roles in the Field: Musician and Audience

The social dimension of music arises not from symbolism but from differentiated participation. In any musical setting, there are roles: those who produce the material phenomena (the musician), and those who receive them (the audience). These roles are not symmetrical. The musician acts materially; the audience acts neurobiologically. Music thus becomes a shared field in which values are instantiated — but instantiated differently, according to role.

The audience draws on their own biological potential, and this potential is shaped not only by species-level evolution but also by social histories, cultural patterns, and individual biographies. Different audiences will instantiate different values from the same musical event. This leads, eventually, to individuation: the emergence of individualised potentials within a collective field.

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Conclusion: Setting the Frame

Music, in this model, is a process of material activation of biological value, shaped by social differentiation, and construed — when it is — through mental processes like emotion. This is not a theory of music as meaning, but of music as value instantiated materially and made meaningful through consciousness.

In the next post, we turn more closely to the roles of musician and audience, and examine how musical experience arises from their differentiated contributions to a shared field of potential.

2 Resonance and Differentiation: The Musician and the Audience

In the previous post, we introduced a new foundation for understanding music: not as a semiotic system of signs and meanings, but as a material system that activates biological values in social fields. These values — neural biases shaped by evolutionary and personal history — are not meanings in themselves, but potentials for meaning, instantiated materially by music and construed, if at all, through mental processes such as emotion.

In this post, we focus on how musical experience arises through the differentiation of roles — the musician and the audience — within a shared field. This differentiation gives music its social character, and allows material activations of value to become socially significant events.

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Differentiated Roles in a Shared Field

Music is always social — not because it communicates ideas or represents shared codes, but because it unfolds within a field of differentiated roles. At a minimum, this includes a musician, who acts materially to shape sound in time, and an audience, who is subjected to those sounds and thereby participates in the instantiation of value.

The relation is asymmetrical. The musician acts; the audience responds. But both participate in a shared field of potential. The musician's bodily actions — gestures, breath, motion — organise sound structures in space and time. These sound structures, in turn, act on the biological potential of the audience, activating patterns of neural value that shape perception, feeling, and attention.

This dynamic is not symbolic. The music does not “stand for” something. Rather, it does something: it resonates with the embodied systems of the listener, instantiating values that have no fixed meaning until — or unless — consciousness construes them through mental processes.

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Resonance and Activation: The Social Field as Coherence

What gives music its power is not the presence of “content,” but the production of coherence across bodies. The musician’s material actions create patterns that select and reinforce values in the audience’s biological system. These values, when co-instantiated across a group, give rise to what we might call social resonance: a shared field of attunement, in which different bodies instantiate similar patterns of value.

This is not communication in the linguistic sense, nor is it emotion transfer. It is the emergence of synchrony — of patterned biological coherence — across multiple organisms within a field. And this synchrony becomes the basis for any further construal: whether emotional (joy, sadness), or cognitive (“this reminds me of…”).

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The Musician’s Role

The musician's role is not to encode meaning, but to organise material phenomena in ways that activate biological potential. This involves bodily mastery, sensitivity to timing and variation, and awareness (sometimes tacit) of how patterns act on the bodies of others. The musician draws on their own embodied potential — sensorimotor skills, learned constraints, and individual experience — to create processes that will instantiate values in others.

In this sense, the musician is not a communicator but a value catalyst: someone who brings about particular activations of neural bias in a field of bodies, under conditions shaped by social roles.

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The Audience’s Role

The audience, for their part, are not passive recipients but active fields of potential. Each listener brings their own history of neural selection, cultural learning, and social individuation to the musical event. What is instantiated as value in one body may not be in another. But where patterns of resonance emerge, these can form the basis for new social coherence — a shared attentional or affective field.

If and when these values are construed, they are construed by consciousness as mental processes — such as emotion, cognition, or desideration. These construals are not part of the music, but of the semiotic order construed by the listener of their experience.

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Individuation and Value Selection

As different listeners construe musical experience in different ways, they begin to individuate. That is, they develop distinct meaning potentials from the collective potential of the musical event. These differences do not undermine the sociality of music; rather, they constitute it. Music becomes a field not of fixed meanings, but of shared value activations through which differentiated construals may arise.

Music, then, offers not a universal code, but a common material ground for individuated perspectives to emerge — perspectives that may later be communicated, symbolised, or reflected upon, but which are rooted in non-symbolic, embodied activation.

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Conclusion: From Action to Coherence

In summary, music acts on the body, not the code. It works by instantiating biological value through material sound processes, in a differentiated but shared field. The musician acts materially to shape these processes; the audience instantiates and, where possible, construes the activations as mental processes.

What arises is not a message but a field of resonance, from which meaning can emerge — not as transmission, but as construal of value in consciousness.

In the next and final post of this series, we explore how these fields of resonance function across cultural and historical time: how music comes to play a role in larger systems of value, identity, and transformation.

3 Music as Field: Value, Identity, and Cultural Transformation

In the first post of this series, we grounded music not in meaning but in material value — a system that activates biological potentials within socially differentiated roles. In the second, we explored how musical experience unfolds within a field shaped by the complementary roles of musician and audience, where resonance emerges not as communication, but as shared biological activation.

In this final post, we step back to examine the cultural dimension of music: how it functions as a field of potential across time and history, how it contributes to identity and social formation, and how it participates in the transformation of value systems across generations.

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Music as Cultural Field

Music, like all social phenomena, does not arise anew in each performance. It is embedded in fields of potential formed by prior instantiations — by musical practices, traditions, genres, performances, and expectations that have already shaped the systems of value with which people engage.

These fields are not symbolic codes but historically sedimented potentials: dynamic constraints on what can be activated, selected, or recognised as “musical” in a given context. These potentials are material — they shape the kinds of sound structures and bodily gestures that are perceived as music — and they are also social, in that they have been collectively shaped by previous generations of value activation.

In this way, music becomes a field of cultural inheritance: a system of material potentials that can be instantiated in new performances, and thereby reshaped in the unfolding of new social resonances.

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The Cultural Role of the Musician

The musician, within this cultural field, is not simply a performer of sound but a selector and transformer of value potentials. They draw on shared traditions — melodic idioms, rhythmic practices, harmonic conventions — but instantiate them in unique ways that respond to new contexts, audiences, and individuated trajectories.

Each performance is an actualisation of system potential — a point on the cline of instantiation — that both draws from and contributes to the evolving cultural field. Through these processes, the collective potential of a musical tradition is continually renewed, diversified, or challenged.

This is why musical creativity is never isolated: it is always situated within a social field of resonance, where patterns of value — including novelty — become recognisable through shared activation histories.

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Identity, Individuation, and Social Differentiation

As listeners participate in music over time, they individuate. Each listener develops their own meaning potential within the broader system — a system constituted by the historical sedimentation of cultural instantiations. These individuated potentials influence how new musical events are experienced, and what values are activated.

In this way, music and identity co-evolve. Music is not just a background to identity formation — it is a material field in which distinct value pathways are selected and reinforced, often in concert with social positioning (age, class, gender, culture, etc.). Musical practices become associated with social groups, and musical resonances become resources for social differentiation.

Importantly, this is not the transfer of meaning from music to identity, but the mutual shaping of value activation across systems — a process that can later be construed in semiotic terms, but which is rooted in the material order.

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Music and Cultural Transformation

Over time, the fields of musical potential themselves transform. As new values are instantiated in performance, new possibilities emerge for what music can be, do, or activate. The process is non-linear and historically contingent: cultural values shift, new technologies intervene, bodies and environments change.

But at its root, transformation remains tied to the same ontology: music as the material activation of value within socially differentiated systems.

This means that cultural change is not a semiotic process alone. It is not just a reinterpretation of symbols. It involves the reconfiguration of value potentials — of which biological activations are meaningful, in which bodies, and under what social conditions. When a new musical form emerges and becomes resonant, it is because it has instantiated a different field of coherence — one that may later be reflected in language, identity, or ideology, but which began as an embodied, material resonance.

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Conclusion: A Material Field of Living Value

We have traced music from its biological grounding in neural value to its social unfolding in shared resonance, and its cultural role in transforming fields of potential. What emerges is not a model of music as code, but as field: a relational, material system through which value is activated, shared, and transformed.

In this model:

• Meaning arises only through mental construal;

• Value is a biological potential selected and activated in social fields;

• Music is a material system for instantiating value across differentiated roles and across time.

This ontology allows us to reconnect musical experience to its material roots without reducing it to physics or individual psychology. It locates music in the ongoing process of field formation, where value, identity, and transformation are materially instantiated and only secondarily construed.

Coda: Music Beyond Meaning

Across this trilogy, we have traced a path from biology to culture, unfolding music not as a symbolic code but as a material field of value — one that activates, organises, and transforms the lived potentials of consciousness and collectivity.

We began by grounding music in neural bias — evolved biological systems of value that can be selectively activated in performance. We showed how music operates within social differentiation, as musicians and audiences instantiate different roles in the co-creation of resonance. And we followed these patterns into the cultural domain, where music contributes to identity, inheritance, and transformation by reshaping the fields of material potential available to a community.

Throughout, we resisted the temptation to treat music as a semiotic system — as something that conveys meanings in the way language does. Instead, we affirmed that music precedes meaning: it organises value in material form, and only becomes meaningful when that activation is construed by consciousness through mental processes such as emotion, memory, or reflection.

This distinction — between value as material activation and meaning as semiotic construal — is at the heart of the ontology we've developed. It allows us to treat music as both deeply embodied and fully social, without collapsing into either individual subjectivity or cultural symbolism.

Indeed, what music reveals is something more general about our being-in-the-world: that we are not isolated minds interpreting symbols, but bodies in resonance with others, unfolding together in dynamic fields of potential. Music, in this view, is not a representation of our world — it is one of the ways we make that world, through the activation of shared value in time.

And so, the model we’ve developed here may extend beyond music. Any system — social, aesthetic, scientific — that activates embodied values in a field of collective experience can be understood in similar terms: not as a message, but as a resonance; not as a meaning, but as an activation of potential.

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.

Attractors of Value in Collective Fields

1 The Idea of the Attractor

Why do some musical patterns draw us in — not just as individuals, but as groups? Why do certain rhythms, riffs, or sonic gestures recur across disparate contexts, binding people into shared experience? And why do others flare briefly and vanish, leaving only the faint trace of their momentary force?

This series explores music as a field of value-laden resonance, shaped not by semantic content but by attractors — dynamic centres of gravity in collective experience. These are not symbols or messages. They do not denote meaning in the way language does. Rather, they function as organising forces in embodied, social systems — drawing listeners into coalesced states of feeling, orientation, and affiliation.

Music as a Field of Emergence

We begin with a shift in perspective. Instead of viewing music as an object, or a signal passed from maker to receiver, we treat it as a field: an emergent space of patterned relations, unfolding in time, across bodies and environments. Within this field, coherence is not imposed from above, but emerges from below — from repeated actions, shared histories, and the resonant interplay of material and social forces.

Attractors are what give this field structure. They are not fixed points, but regions of relative stability in the flow of dynamic activity. In mathematical terms, attractors describe tendencies for a system to settle into particular patterns of behaviour — not rigid endpoints, but configurations toward which activity converges. In our case, what converges is not only sonic patterning, but patterns of embodied value.

From Neural Selectivity to Collective Orientation

The concept of the attractor has its roots in neurodynamics. In Edelman’s theory of neuronal group selection, value is not applied after perception — it is intrinsic to it. Perceptual activity is shaped by value-driven selection in a field of neuronal variation. Certain configurations of neural firing are selected and stabilised by the co-activation of value systems — what Edelman terms value-categories.

Importantly, this process does not end at the boundary of the skull. Because we are social beings, attuned to others and to cultural environments, attractors of value do not operate only at the level of individual perception. Musical experience often occurs in shared fields of embodied orientation: in concerts, ceremonies, dance floors, and digital collectives. In these settings, the attractor becomes not only a perceptual regularity but a social magnet, drawing participants into synchronised affective and bodily states.

Not Meaning, but Meaningfulness

In previous series, we established that music is not a semiotic system. It does not signify in the way language does; it has no lexicon, no grammar, no denotation. And yet, music is deeply meaningful. This paradox dissolves when we shift from thinking in terms of symbolic representation to thinking in terms of value-based resonance.

An attractor in a collective musical field is a coalescence of embodied meaningfulness. It does not stand for something; it draws together strands of affective, temporal, and social experience. It is a centre of attraction not for conceptual meaning, but for felt coherence — a convergence of orientations in the flow of time.

What Follows

In the posts to come, we will explore how such attractors emerge, take hold, circulate, fragment, and recombine. We will trace their role in forming social identities and group affiliations, and in mediating between the local and the global. And we will show how a relational ontology — one that begins not with things, but with patterned relations — allows us to model music as a force field of value in motion.

Next: Resonance and Value-Coalescence — how patterns of sound become patterns of felt orientation in collective life.

2 Resonance and Value-Coalescence

At the heart of musical experience lies a felt sense of resonance. This resonance is not merely acoustic or metaphorical; it names a process in which the patterned unfolding of sound aligns with patterned dispositions in bodies and groups. When such alignment occurs, something stabilises — not into stasis, but into a temporary coherence of value. This is what we call value-coalescence.

In this post, we examine how sonic patterns resonate with embodied predispositions to form attractors of shared orientation — attractors that function not as signs, but as fields of convergence in the social production of value.

From Embodiment to Coalescence

Resonance, in its simplest sense, involves the mutual activation of patterned tendencies. A guitar string resonates because its natural frequency is excited by another vibration. In the same way, an embodied listener resonates with a musical event when their value-laden perceptual systems are activated by the patterned movement of sound in time.

This is not passive reception. As shown in earlier series, perception is an active process of differentiation and selection, deeply shaped by histories of embodiment and participation. Each listener brings with them a configuration of value-categories, honed by culture, by repetition, by affective investment. When sound engages these configurations — when it aligns with their orientational readiness — resonance occurs.

But when this resonance is shared, something more emerges: a coalescence of value across bodies. The attractor is not located in the sound alone, nor in any single body, but in the dynamic relational field that emerges when multiple bodies orient together around the same felt coherence.

The Temporality of Coalescence

Value-coalescence is always temporal. It does not precede the event, nor persist as a substance. It emerges in the moment of convergence, as perceptual systems entrain with the unfolding pattern of sound. It is a fleeting, processual phenomenon — yet one with remarkable staying power.

Why does a groove “lock in”? Why do chants, anthems, or motifs persist across time and cultures? Because they function as attractors — forms whose recurrence helps stabilise patterns of collective orientation. These attractors do not represent identities or emotions; they entrain and activate them.

Here, we glimpse the deep link between resonance and social time. Musical attractors do not simply unfold in time; they shape time — not as an abstract metric, but as lived, coordinated orientation. Through resonance, groups enter a shared temporality in which value becomes a distributed phenomenon.

Beyond Representation

Crucially, this process does not rely on representation. There is no need for music to mean something in order for it to gather and stabilise value. The attractor is not a code; it is a site of alignment. Its meaningfulness lies not in what it signifies, but in what it organises — the emergent coherence of affect, embodiment, and group orientation.

This shift — from meaning to meaningfulness, from representation to resonance — is central to our relational model. Value is not assigned to music from outside, nor discovered within it as a hidden message. It is actualised in the encounter, in the temporal convergence of sound and socially attuned perception.

What Follows

The attractor, then, is a stabilising force in a dynamic field. But this stability is never permanent. In the next post, we consider how patterns recur — how attractors are re-instantiated through repetition, ritual, and media circulation — and how these processes extend value-coalescence beyond the moment of performance.

Next: Repetition, Ritual, and Re-instantiation — how attractors persist across time and social scale.

3 Repetition, Ritual, and Re-instantiation

In the previous post, we explored how sonic resonance gives rise to value-coalescence: the temporary stabilisation of shared orientation through the alignment of patterned sound and embodied perception. But what allows such coalescences to persist, to recur, to function beyond the moment of enactment? In this post, we examine the role of repetition, ritual, and re-instantiation in sustaining attractors of value across time and social scale.

Repetition as Social Technology

Repetition is more than reiteration. It is a social technology: a way of drawing perceptual systems back into alignment, reinforcing previously coalesced configurations of value. Through repetition, patterns become familiar — not in the sense of passive recognition, but in the sense of embodied readiness. To encounter a recurring motif, rhythm, or form is to be returned to a known site of resonance.

This is particularly evident in musical forms whose power lies not in surprise but in recurrence: the loop, the refrain, the theme. These are not merely compositional techniques; they are techniques of social re-entry, allowing bodies to re-enter shared fields of orientation.

Repetition also builds probabilistic weight into the relational field. With each recurrence, a pattern becomes more likely to activate value-laden categories — both in individual perception and in collective orientation. This is what makes certain musical motifs so reliably affective, and why others fade into noise.

Ritual and the Binding of Time

Whereas repetition operates at the level of patterned form, ritual functions at the level of social process. It organises time and attention around the recurrence of value-laden forms. In doing so, ritual reinforces not just the attractor, but the collective field in which the attractor is instantiated.

A chant, a hymn, a ceremonial rhythm — each can become an anchor for collective identity, precisely because it binds value to a temporally structured event. Ritual not only marks time but creates social time: a temporality in which the present resonates with the remembered and the anticipated. Attractors are sustained here not only by recurrence, but by institutionalised repetition — socially scaffolded enactments that return bodies to shared orientation.

This binding of time is especially evident in rites of passage, seasonal festivals, or recurring protest songs. These are not mere repetitions of content but re-instantiations of value: material events through which fields of social orientation are periodically reset.

Re-instantiation and Social Memory

Repetition and ritual are effective because they draw on a broader process of re-instantiation. Each occurrence of a musical pattern does more than recall its past: it extends the attractor’s trajectory, modifying its future potential for resonance.

This means that attractors are not static. They develop histories. A national anthem does not mean the same after a revolution; a protest song gathers new salience in times of upheaval. With each re-instantiation, the attractor shifts — not away from coherence, but through it. These shifts are governed by changes in the relational field: the evolving configurations of value, attention, embodiment, and power that constitute the social.

Thus, the attractor is not a fixed form, but a temporally evolving site of value potential. It functions in a kind of distributed social memory, wherein value is not stored in individuals or artefacts but maintained through enactment.

Looking Ahead

We now begin to see how music does not merely reflect social values, but materially shapes the conditions for their emergence, recurrence, and transformation. In the next post, we focus on how attractors orient bodies — not just into collective synchrony, but into differentiated social roles and relations.

Next: Fields of Orientation and Social Differentiation — how attractors help produce shared identity and distinction.

4 Fields of Orientation and Social Differentiation

In the previous post, we examined how repetition, ritual, and re-instantiation sustain attractors of value across time, binding bodies into recurring formations of collective resonance. In this post, we turn to the structure of the field itself: how shared patterns of value not only align participants but also differentiate roles, positions, and trajectories within the field. Music, as a system of material affordance and embodied engagement, plays a crucial role in this differentiation.

Orientation Is Not Uniform

To enter a collective field of value is not simply to align with others, but to be positioned in relation to them. Even within a single moment of musical resonance — say, a live performance — participants are not identically situated. The singer and the audience, the conductor and the ensemble, the dancer and the drummer: each occupies a distinct vantage point within the field, with its own orientation to the sonic attractor.

These distinctions are not merely spatial or functional; they are semiotic and affective. Each position carries different potentials for agency, response, and recognition. In this way, the attractor acts as a differentiator of social function. It enables orientation but does not enforce uniformity.

Differentiation through Participation

Roles emerge through patterns of participation. The repetition of situated actions — drumming, listening, leading, echoing — consolidates differentiated functions. These functions become expectable within the field, and over time may be institutionalised into roles: performer/audience, soloist/accompanist, leader/supporter.

These roles are not rigid categories but zones of potential: attractors within the attractor. For example, the role of soloist may invite behaviours associated with expressive individuation, while the accompanist role may orient bodies toward collective support and timing. The same individual may shift between roles across events or within a single musical process — each shift producing a reconfiguration of embodied relation to value.

In this sense, musical attractors do not impose roles but afford them. They shape the field of what is meaningful and possible in collective orientation.

Differentiation and Identity

This process of differentiation also contributes to the formation of social identity. A participant’s repeated orientation to a specific attractor from a specific position may sediment into a self-understanding — a sense of who one is within the field. This identity is not internal and fixed, but relational and enacted. It is realised through recurrent patterns of orientation and participation.

Moreover, identity is often co-articulated with recognition: being positioned by others in relation to an attractor. For example, a particular vocal style or bodily comportment may signal alignment with a specific genre or community, and thus orient others to the participant’s social role or cultural affiliation. In this way, musical differentiation contributes to social categorisation, not through explicit labelling, but through embodied fields of practice.

Differentiation and Power

Finally, not all roles are equally empowered. Fields of orientation are also fields of differential access and influence. Who controls the attractor? Who decides when it recurs, or how it evolves? Who is granted the authority to lead, and whose participation is marginalised or excluded?

These questions reveal the political dimension of value attractors. While music may create spaces for collective resonance, it also participates in the reproduction — or transformation — of social hierarchies. The differentiation it enables is never neutral.

Attractors of value are therefore not only aesthetic or affective; they are also structuring forces within collective life. They shape the field by drawing bodies into differential positions of agency, identity, and power.

Looking Ahead

In the next post, we turn to the temporal dynamics of change within collective fields. If attractors evolve through re-instantiation, how do they respond to shifting social conditions, emergent value formations, and competing orientations?

Next: Transformations in the Field: Conflict, Emergence, and Renewal — how fields of value shift, fracture, or realign in response to pressure, invention, or historical rupture.

5 Transformations in the Field: Conflict, Emergence, and Renewal

In previous posts, we explored how attractors of value emerge, persist, and differentiate participants within collective fields. But fields are not static. They are shaped by tensions, ruptures, and innovations — processes that unsettle existing attractors and create the conditions for new formations. This post examines how attractors evolve or dissolve through conflict, emergence, and renewal.

Fields Under Pressure

Collective fields are always susceptible to internal contradiction and external disruption. Competing orientations may arise within the same field, each pulling bodies toward different attractors. These tensions can produce conflictual resonances, in which participants are differently attuned, misaligned, or actively opposed.

Such divergence is not inherently destructive. Indeed, it often plays a generative role. Tension introduces instability, creating openings for reconfiguration. When the existing attractor no longer satisfies the embodied orientations of participants — when it no longer "holds" the field — the system enters a state of dynamic disequilibrium.

These moments of breakdown are not rare exceptions but constitutive features of cultural practice. They offer insight into the temporality of collective life: how value fields evolve not only through accumulation but also through discontinuity.

Emergence and Revaluation

From disequilibrium, new attractors may emerge. These are not imposed from outside but arise within the dynamics of the field, often at its margins. Participants may begin to align with new patterns — sonic, affective, postural — that offer alternative modes of resonance. If these patterns sustain attention and repetition, they begin to stabilise, gradually sedimenting into new attractors of value.

This is the process of revaluation: the shifting of embodied investment from one attractor to another. Such shifts are rarely neutral. They often reflect deeper transformations in social identification, collective memory, or ethical stance. For instance, new musical styles may carry altered relationships to gender, race, or class, producing not just sonic novelty but reoriented social meaning.

Importantly, the emergence of a new attractor does not necessarily entail the destruction of the old. Multiple attractors can coexist in heterogeneous tension, drawing participants into overlapping or contested orientations. Fields are often plural, their histories braided.

Renewal through Re-entrainment

At times, existing attractors do not dissolve but are revitalised. Rituals may be re-inflected, genres reinterpreted, and practices re-contextualised in ways that renew their grip on bodies. This renewal is not mere repetition; it is a re-entrainment of affect and attention under changed conditions.

Such renewal often involves subtle shifts in temporal or material affordances — a new instrumentation, a revised pacing, a different staging — that restore or amplify the field's resonance. In this way, value attractors may persist not through rigid preservation but through adaptive transformation.

Renewal may also entail political reclamation. Dispossessed or marginalised groups may reinvest familiar forms with new meanings, enacting continuity as a mode of resistance. Here, the past becomes a resource for reorienting the present.

Music as Field Catalyst

Throughout these transformations, music plays a catalytic role. As a medium of embodied alignment, it can both reinforce and unsettle attractors. A single musical event — a performance, a remix, a protest chant — may activate latent tensions, precipitate new alignments, or articulate emerging values.

Music thus functions not merely within the field, but on the field. It is both participant and process, both artefact and attractor. Its temporal unfolding makes it uniquely suited to track — and sometimes accelerate — the reorganisation of collective value.

Looking Ahead

In the final post of this series, we turn toward a more synthetic view: what does it mean to understand musical practice as a process of navigating attractors in dynamic social fields? And how might such a view contribute to broader conversations in cultural theory, social ontology, and the study of value?

Coda: Music, Fields, and the Dynamics of Value

Across this series, we have traced how musical practices participate in the constitution of value within collective fields. We began by describing attractors of value as material patterns — sonic, gestural, spatial — that draw bodies into alignment and generate shared orientations. These attractors do not simply exist; they emerge, stabilise, differentiate, conflict, and transform over time. And music, in all its situated materiality, plays a central role in this unfolding.

From a relational ontology, this process is not reducible to individual psychology or social structure. It is the co-arising of participants and potentials — a field dynamic where meaning is not predefined, but enacted in the resonance between bodies, sounds, and histories. Attractors form where material processes coincide with affective investment. They sustain value through repetition, but they also invite variation, critique, and revaluation.

Crucially, musical engagement is not only responsive but generative. Listeners and makers alike actualise value through their embodied interactions with unfolding sound. These interactions reverberate outward, shaping how groups perceive, feel, and orient themselves — not just to the music, but to each other and the world.

This perspective enables a more dynamic view of culture. Instead of thinking of music as a reflection of social identity, we see it as a practice through which identities are coalesced and contested. Instead of treating values as pre-given norms, we view them as emergent tendencies within relational systems — fragile, contingent, and yet deeply binding.

Understanding music as a site of value attraction also allows us to attend more closely to its political and ethical dimensions. What kinds of attention does a musical field entrain? What bodies are centred or marginalised by its attractors? What is rendered audible, and what is silenced? These are not peripheral concerns. They are intrinsic to the dynamics of the field.

As we close this series, we return to a simple proposition: music matters because it moves us — not just emotionally, but bodily, socially, and ontologically. It draws us into fields of shared significance. It makes values felt, not as abstractions, but as gravitational pulls on our time, our actions, and our being-with-others.

In that sense, music is not outside the world of value — it is one of the ways the world becomes valuable.