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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…”).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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Meaning arises only through mental construal;
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Value is a biological potential selected and activated in social fields;
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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.