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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.

11 July 2025

Affective Dimensions: Value, Emotion, and Music II

1 Feeling the Music — Emotion as the Pulse of Value

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2 The Affective Architecture of Listening

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3 Shared Feeling, Cultural Memory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4 Music and the Evolution of Affect

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5 Music, Meaning, and the Social Life of Feeling

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

What, then, is the nature of this meaningfulness?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

07 July 2025

Affective Dimensions: Value, Emotion, and Music I

1 The Feeling of Value

Why does music move us?

Not just metaphorically — viscerally. A single note can bring tears. A rhythm can lift a crowd. A harmonic shift can make the world seem to stop.

This power isn’t accidental. It arises from how music engages the value systems of the brain and body.

In Edelman’s theory of neuronal group selection, perception isn’t just about recognising what something is — it’s also about sensing what it means for the organism. Perceptual systems are saturated with value. They don’t just categorise the world; they rank, weigh, and filter it through the lens of feeling.

This is where music finds its power. Because it doesn’t represent or refer — it resonates. And in doing so, it activates patterns of feeling already shaped by our biological histories and social lives.

When we say a musical phrase is “beautiful” or “haunting,” we’re pointing to this activation — the way music aligns with internal states, amplifying and transforming them.

But value isn’t just personal. It’s socially shaped, historically sedimented, and culturally expressed. In the next post, we’ll explore how emotion and value work together to make music meaningful — not as a code, but as a felt force.

2 Emotion, Value, and the Body

Music doesn’t just pass through us — it grips us. Our hearts race. Skin tingles. Breath catches. Movement surges. Why?

Because emotion begins in the body. Long before we interpret or explain a feeling, our nervous systems are already engaged — tuning, orienting, bracing, releasing. Emotions are not added onto experience. They are the form that value takes in lived time.

This is central to understanding music’s power. It acts directly on the affective systems of the listener — systems that are shaped not only by evolution, but by development and culture. From Edelman’s perspective, these systems emerge through selection: affective circuits that consistently support adaptive interaction become reinforced.

In music perception, then, it’s not just sound that’s perceived — it’s value-laden experience. A minor chord doesn’t represent sadness; it activates a bodily system shaped by histories of association, context, and internal states. That activation is the sadness.

This means that music’s affective power doesn’t depend on meaning in a semiotic sense. It’s embodied, emergent, and immediate — rooted in the listener’s own experiential architecture. And because listeners are shaped by social environments, these affective responses are never merely private. They are also social facts.

In the next post, we’ll explore how shared value systems allow music to move not only individuals, but entire communities — making emotion a medium of social synchrony.

3 From Individual Feeling to Collective Value

When a singer’s voice quivers with emotion, and a crowd hushes in response — something more than personal feeling is taking place. The emotion becomes shared. This is how music moves from private perception to public resonance.

At the heart of this shift is the body’s openness to social modulation. From infancy, our affective systems are shaped in interaction: we attune to the voices, rhythms, and responses of others. These early experiences become the scaffolding for a lifetime of affective learning.

In a relational ontology, this means emotion is not simply expressed in music, but activated within and between listeners. Music doesn’t “communicate” emotion the way language communicates meaning. Rather, it entrains bodies and brains — shaping pulse, breath, posture, and orientation — in ways that align experience across individuals.

This alignment is what allows music to function as a carrier of collective value. Listeners don’t merely feel; they co-feel. And this co-feeling, over time, becomes part of what music means to a community — not semantically, but socially.

Think of protest songs, religious chants, national anthems. Their emotional impact is not just in what they sound like, but in what they summon: histories, struggles, identities, hopes. In this sense, affective response becomes a kind of cultural memory — felt, not told.

In the next post, we’ll look at how music’s affective power is shaped and sustained by neurobiological mechanisms, connecting embodied feeling to the deep structure of consciousness itself.

4 Neurobiology of Affect: Value Systems and Musical Activation

What makes a musical phrase feel right? Why does a minor chord stir sorrow, or a crescendo raise goosebumps? These experiences arise not from music’s structure alone, but from how that structure interacts with the value systems of the brain.

In Gerald Edelman’s theory of Neuronal Group Selection, perception and memory are not passive reflections of the world, but active processes guided by value-category systems. These systems link sensory patterns with value-based responses — essentially telling the brain, this matters.

When we listen to music, our auditory system doesn’t merely analyse pitch and rhythm. It engages value-laden repertoires built from past experiences, shaped by bodily states, social contexts, and affective learning. The brain doesn’t decode music; it resonates with it.

In this view, musical affect is not an “add-on” to perception — it’s built into it. The listener’s perceptual systems are always entraining with patterns of activated value: intensities, tensions, releases, and relational dynamics that are felt before they are known.

Crucially, these activations are not just emotional in the narrow sense of joy or sadness. They reflect deep, embodied orientations to the world — readiness to move, attend, withhold, approach, retreat. Music taps into these primordial circuits, modulating them in time.

This is why musical affect feels so direct: it bypasses language, riding on pathways that link auditory input with the brainstem, limbic system, and cortical maps of bodily space. It’s not just “in our heads” — it’s in our posture, pulse, and breath.

In the final post of this series, we’ll consider how these neurobiological foundations interact with cultural shaping to produce musical experiences that are both intensely personal and widely shared.

5 Feeling Together: Shared Affect and Cultural Patterning

If musical value is grounded in individual biology, how can it also be shared? How do music makers and listeners — with different histories and bodies — experience such powerful forms of affective resonance?

The answer lies in cultural patterning.

Just as bodily experience shapes neural value systems, cultural participation shapes the kinds of sounds that come to activate those systems. Through countless experiences of music in ceremony, play, performance, media, and memory, listeners become attuned to specific forms of movement, timing, and contour that carry affective weight.

These aren’t fixed “meanings,” but conventional affordances: rising melodies that feel uplifting, heavy bass that feels grounding, certain rhythms that invite dance or reflection. Cultural practices scaffold these associations, making some patterns more likely to resonate — and more likely to be produced by music makers aiming to move others.

This is not a matter of universal codes, nor is it entirely subjective. Rather, it reflects a shared history of embodied participation. Value systems are shaped not only by biology but by the social-material conditions in which perception unfolds.

This is why musical styles, genres, and traditions matter. They serve as reservoirs of collective resonance, organising sound in ways that cohere with shared experiences, identities, and emotional lives. When a listener “gets” a groove or is moved by a harmony, they are drawing on this deep well of socially sedimented affective patterning.

Of course, such resonances are never static. Cultures change. Technologies evolve. Personal biographies unfold. But the social function of music endures: to bring bodies into relation through affect, to enable us to feel — and feel together.

Reflective Coda – The Pulse of Valuing

Throughout this series, we have approached music not as language, symbol, or code — but as a social system of sound that resonates with the embodied, value-laden lives of listeners. From the first flicker of affect in a newborn’s cry to the shared surges of emotion in concert halls and community rituals, music traces the contours of what matters.

We’ve seen how value is not added to sound, but activated through it — shaped by evolution, refined by personal experience, and patterned through cultural participation. Music is thus neither reducible to biology nor separable from it. It is a phenomenon that unfolds in time, but resonates across lifetimes and social worlds.

Music’s power lies in its ability to entrain us — not only in rhythm, but in feeling and in meaning. It draws listeners into processes that both reflect and reshape their values, desires, and relations. To attend to music is to attend to how consciousness itself moves: through activation, resonance, and adaptation.

As we continue to explore music in its technological, historical, and ethical dimensions, this insight will remain central: music is not what we know, but how we feel what we are — together, and in time.

04 July 2025

Resonant Bodies: Further Explorations in Music and Relational Ontology

1 Embodiment and Music Perception

In conventional accounts, music perception is often framed as the reception of auditory stimuli by a passive listener. However, from the perspective of relational ontology, such an account fails to recognise that perception is a dynamic process involving the body as a whole — a process that unfolds in time and activates systems of value as well as sensation.

On this view, the music listener is not a detached subject perceiving an external object, but a living participant in a field of ongoing material processes. The musical phenomenon — a temporally structured configuration of acoustic energy — engages with the listener’s embodied systems through patterns of resonance. These include not only the auditory system but also motor and affective systems whose response patterns have been shaped by both evolutionary inheritance and individual history.

Perception, in Edelman’s terms, involves the activation of value-categories: neuronal groups whose selection has been reinforced by their relevance to the organism’s past experiences. In the case of music, these value-categories correspond not to the semantic content of symbolic expression, but to patterns of sound that have acquired affective significance through repeated exposure, association, and social interaction.

The listener’s response is therefore not a decoding of meaning but a selective entrainment with patterns of sound that coincide with embodied value. Rhythmic and melodic structures are perceived not in abstraction, but as patterns that resonate with the body’s own temporal structures — those of breath, movement, and emotional modulation. The experience of music is thus not merely auditory, but deeply embodied.

Moreover, this embodied engagement is not passive. The listener's perceptual systems are active participants in the shaping of musical experience. The temporal progression of music entrains these systems in a way that is co-constitutive: the listener’s value-history structures the experience of the music, and the music’s unfolding patterns activate and potentially reshape that value-history in turn.

Importantly, this model does not attribute meaning to music in a semiotic sense. The music maker produces a material phenomenon — a configuration of sound energy — which functions socially by activating value in the listener. This social function does not involve symbolic construal or reference, but affective and perceptual resonance. Music is not interpreted as meaning; it is experienced as value.

The implications of this model will be pursued in subsequent posts, beginning with an examination of time not as a container of musical events but as a dimension of unfolding that links music, consciousness, and value in processes of resonance.

2 Temporal Unfolding and the Experience of Music

Within the framework of relational ontology, time is not conceived as a neutral container in which events are located. Rather, time is the dimension of the unfolding of processes — and consciousness itself is one such process. From this perspective, music and consciousness share a fundamental temporal architecture: both unfold, and both are constituted in and through their unfolding.

This has profound implications for our understanding of music perception. Music does not occur in time; it is time — or more precisely, it is a phenomenon constituted through temporally patterned material processes. These processes are not simply heard; they are experienced as becoming. The listener does not receive a completed object but participates in an unfolding whose temporality is intrinsic to its significance.

In listening to music, then, we are not encountering discrete sound-events strung along a timeline. We are experiencing a continuous modulation of patterned energy, whose temporality is experienced through the shifting configurations of resonance and value in our own bodily systems. These systems — motor, affective, perceptual — are themselves temporally structured. Their activity is synchronised with, and shaped by, the temporal articulation of the music.

This synchronisation is not imposed from without. It arises through mutual entrainment: a relational alignment between the temporality of the music and the temporality of the listener’s embodied systems. This entrainment is affective, not interpretive; it does not involve construing meaning, but actualising value through co-temporal resonance.

Moreover, just as music does not exist outside its temporal unfolding, neither does the listener. Consciousness, on this account, is not an observer of events in time but a field of unfolding processes. In the experience of music, the unfolding of sound and the unfolding of consciousness interpenetrate. The resonant interaction between them gives rise to the phenomenon of musical experience.

This view offers a relational, temporally grounded model of musical significance — one in which musical value is not decoded from symbolic content but emerges from the dynamic alignment of embodied time-structures. The listener’s experience is neither predetermined nor arbitrary; it is an outcome of processes of resonance that are structured by the history of prior selections — biological, social, and personal — that shape the listener’s systems of value.

The next post will turn from time to space, examining the spatiality of music not in terms of metric location, but as an emergent dimension of embodied resonance.

3 Resonant Space: Music and the Spatiality of Embodiment

If time is the unfolding of process, then space, in a relational ontology, is not an empty expanse in which entities are placed but a dimension emergent from the relational positioning of those entities. As such, space is always space-for-something — a functional dimension whose contours are shaped by the systems through which it is enacted.

In the context of music, space is not a static background in which sound occurs. Rather, it is an emergent property of the interaction between sound and the body. The experience of musical space arises from the organisation of auditory phenomena in relation to embodied systems of perception and orientation.

Musical sounds are patterned not only temporally but also in frequency, intensity, timbre, and stereo location — dimensions which are mapped by the auditory system onto embodied schemata. These schemata are spatial in a lived sense: they orient the body toward sources, textures, movements, and depths. Yet they do so not by reference to an objective geometry, but through patterns of resonance and difference.

Importantly, this spatiality is not simply perceived; it is enacted. The listener’s body is not a passive receiver of sonic information but a participant in the generation of musical space. Through affective orientation, motor resonance, and perceptual attunement, the body co-constructs the spatial character of the musical experience.

In this sense, musical space is not ‘in’ the music alone, nor solely in the body of the listener. It is a relational field — a space of co-ordination between the material phenomena produced by the music maker and the perceptual-cognitive-affective systems of the listener. The listener’s spatial experience is shaped by cultural histories, neural architectures, and previous selections that guide how value is distributed across the sonic field.

Thus, musical spatiality is not a mapping of abstract coordinates but an emergent dimension of value, shaped by the patterns of perceptual selection that music activates. In place of Cartesian extension, we find resonant orientation — a lived sense of proximity, distance, enclosure, and direction that arises through processes of co-activation.

The spatial character of music, then, is not separable from its social functioning. It is through space — as well as time — that music entrains affective and attentional alignment. And it is through such alignment that patterns of value are reinforced, refined, and redistributed across listeners.

In the next post, we turn to the body more directly — to consider how music functions as a relational interface between bodies, and how its sociality is enacted not through symbolic exchange, but through value-based synchrony.

4 Relational Bodies: Music and the Sociality of Value

In a relational ontology, the body is not a self-contained object but a nexus of processes — biological, social, and experiential — unfolding in time. Embodiment, on this view, is not merely the substrate of perception and action but the very site where value is activated and distributed. It is in and through embodied systems that experience becomes selectively patterned by relevance, salience, and valence.

When applied to music, this perspective reframes the question of sociality. Music is not a language; it does not symbolise shared meanings. Rather, it functions socially by activating systems of perceptual and affective value in listeners — systems that are themselves shaped by histories of social interaction and selection.

The music maker does not communicate meaning but produces patterns of sound that can entrain value-oriented responses. These responses are not imposed from without but emerge from the listener’s embodied repertoire of perceptual categorisations, affective dispositions, and motor resonances. The sociality of music, then, is not transactional but resonant: a matter of convergence in value activation across bodies.

This activation is not metaphorical. As Edelman’s theory of neuronal group selection proposes, perceptual systems are not separable from value systems; value is intrinsic to categorisation. When a listener hears a sequence of sounds, they are not merely decoding an acoustic signal. Rather, they are undergoing a process in which specific neuronal groups are recruited based on past experiences of coherence, salience, and affective significance.

Such value-based selection is what enables musical phenomena to function across individuals and communities without requiring symbolic mediation. In this sense, music operates at a different level of social complexity than language. Whereas language relies on shared systems of symbolic reference, music operates through convergences in value experience — processes which are more fundamental and more diffuse.

Thus, the sociality of music is not reducible to cultural codes or shared interpretations. It emerges in the attunement of bodies to one another through shared orientations to patterns of sound. These patterns do not convey content but modulate affective and attentional fields, generating synchrony, divergence, or transformation.

Music, in this light, is a medium through which bodies become co-regulated. Its social function is not to tell but to entrain — not to describe the world, but to shape our embodied stance within it.

In the following post, we explore the developmental implications of this model, asking how patterns of musical value take shape over time, and how listeners come to ‘tune in’ to the sonic fields they inhabit.

5 Significance Without Symbol: Why Music Isn’t a Language

A central insight of relational ontology is that not all systems that function socially do so through symbolisation. Music is a case in point. Though it clearly exerts social force — coordinating bodies, shaping affect, delineating identity — it does so without recourse to the symbolic resources that define semiotic systems.

Language is paradigmatically symbolic. It is a semiotic system because it construes meaning through a structured network of paradigmatic choices — sets of oppositions that instantiate values in a system of meaning potential. These choices are realised syntagmatically, that is, as selections instantiated in unfolding sequences. Meaning in language is symbolic value: it depends on the systemic differentiation of possible selections and their value within the system.

Music, by contrast, does not instantiate symbolic meaning. While it is built from choices in sound — in pitch, rhythm, timbre, dynamics — these are not choices in meaning. They are not selections within a semiotic system of paradigmatic oppositions that realise symbolic values. Rather, they are selections from material potential: sonic possibilities instantiated by the music maker in the unfolding of a musical process.

These sonic selections are not ‘interpreted’ by the listener in the manner of linguistic decoding. Instead, they entrain perceptual and affective systems that are already value-laden. In Edelman’s terms, perception is value-saturated: neural groups fire not only in relation to sensory input but in accordance with patterns of past value-based selection. What is perceived is already filtered by relevance and significance — but not symbolic significance.

It is in this sense that music is socially significant without being symbolic. The patterns of sound instantiated by a music maker can activate patterns of value in a listener — shaping mood, attention, orientation, and even motor synchrony — without invoking a symbolic code. This social functioning is real, but it is not semiotic.

One might ask whether the listener’s ‘interpretation’ of musical sound is analogous to reading a text. But this would miss the crux of the model. What occurs is not symbolic construal but experiential resonance: the listener’s bodily system entrains with the sonic pattern in ways shaped by their developmental and social history.

To avoid confusion, it may be helpful to clarify that while music lacks paradigmatic choices in meaning, it certainly involves choices in sound. These are meaningful for the music maker in terms of expressive intention and technique, and they may be perceived by listeners as patterned or coherent. However, these choices do not instantiate meanings in the semiotic sense — they do not realise symbolic values within a system of contrastive oppositions. Their social efficacy lies instead in the patterns of activation they produce across bodies.

Thus, music is not a language, not because it is imprecise or non-verbal, but because it belongs to a different order of social functioning. It is materially instantiated and socially resonant — but not symbolically construed.

The next post explores how these resonances are shaped developmentally, and how listeners come to inhabit musically organised fields of value through processes of embodied learning and environmental interaction.

6 Embodied Development and the Shaping of Musical Value

In relational ontology, value is not added to experience after the fact. It is co-constitutive of perception. Neural systems do not first register a ‘neutral’ world and then assign it meaning or significance; rather, they develop to perceive what has already been associated with adaptive value. Edelman’s theory of neuronal group selection captures this process: perceptual categories evolve in relation to patterns of value that have proven salient for the organism.

This has profound implications for music. It suggests that musical value is not inherent in the sound itself, nor universally shared across listeners. Instead, value is entrained developmentally. The perceptual systems of a listener are shaped through repeated exposure to sounds that co-occur with affective or social salience. As the infant grows, certain sonic patterns — rhythms, contours, textures — come to be associated with comfort, play, movement, or attention. These associations become stabilised as value-categories.

Importantly, these patterns are not arbitrary. They are grounded in embodied activity. Rhythmic regularities coincide with walking and rocking; melodic contours with vocal intonation; timbral changes with shifts in emotional tone. Music, in this sense, extends the embodied regularities of early developmental life — not by symbolising them, but by reinstantiating their temporal and affective logic.

This process is highly social. The value of particular musical patterns is mediated by the social environment. Cultural practices, family rituals, peer interactions, media exposure — all contribute to shaping the listener’s value-laden auditory field. Musical value, therefore, is not private or idiosyncratic, but socially patterned and historically sedimented.

Yet this sociality does not imply semioticity. The transmission of musical value occurs not through the encoding and decoding of symbols but through embodied participation in patterned sonic environments. The music listener does not construe meaning from sound but enters into resonance with it, in ways shaped by their bodily history.

This distinction is key. It highlights the relational, rather than representational, nature of music’s social function. Music does not ‘express’ a message from maker to listener. Rather, the music maker instantiates patterns of sound that, through repetition, variation, and affective force, have the capacity to activate patterns of value in listeners. This process unfolds within a shared world of embodiment — a world structured by movement, affect, interaction, and development.

Such a view does not reduce music to biology, nor to culture, but situates it at their intersection: as a materially instantiated practice whose social force depends on the developmental shaping of value-laden perception.

The next post explores how different musics produce different fields of resonance, and how individuals navigate and inhabit these sonic terrains.

7 Resonant Fields: Musical Plurality and the Dynamics of Social Value

If music’s social function lies in its capacity to activate patterns of value in listeners, then no single piece of music can be expected to evoke value in all listeners equally. Listeners are differently shaped by their developmental histories, and music, accordingly, gives rise not to a single field of value, but to multiple resonant fields — each constituted by a particular listener’s history of embodied engagement with sound.

This plurality is not a weakness of the model but a central feature of its ontology. Musical value is not fixed in the sounds themselves, nor purely in the social structures in which music circulates. It emerges relationally, through the dynamic interplay between sound patterns produced by the music maker and the perceptual systems of music listeners — systems that are themselves the product of social, cultural, and biological development.

A resonant field, in this context, refers to the temporally unfolding co-activation of perceptual and value systems in response to patterned sound. These fields are structured by familiarity, anticipation, and affective salience. What counts as a ‘musical pattern’ in one listener’s perceptual world may not register as such in another’s. The field of resonance is thus an attractor landscape — a dynamic topology of value shaped by repeated exposure and embodied entrainment.

This helps explain both the diversity and the depth of musical experience. One listener might find resonance in the pulsing textures of electronic music, another in the melodic articulations of a folk ballad, and still another in the microtonal inflections of a traditional maqam. Each of these musics is not simply heard — it is felt, inhabited, valued — in ways that are not interchangeable.

Importantly, this model does not imply relativism. Resonant fields are not wholly subjective. They are socially and materially scaffolded, often institutionally supported, and capable of shifting through contact, education, and practice. A listener’s field of resonance is not static but can be expanded, refined, or redirected. The plasticity of perceptual systems allows for the possibility of musical growth — a movement across fields, an enrichment of the value landscape.

Musicians, too, are situated within resonant fields. Their choices are not unconstrained expressions of inner creativity, but selections from within a field of attractors — sonic patterns that have, over time, demonstrated the capacity to resonate. Innovation, in this view, is not invention ex nihilo but the perturbation of existing fields in ways that open new attractor basins.

Musical plurality, then, is not a problem to be solved but a fact to be embraced. It reflects the relational nature of musical value: the fact that music functions socially not by representing shared meanings, but by activating shared (and sometimes divergent) histories of embodied salience.

The next post will explore the concept of affordance in musical experience — the sense in which music calls for movement, response, or change.

8 Affordance and Activation: Music as a Call to the Body

In the relational model developed across this series, music does not transmit messages or meanings. Rather, it functions socially by activating patterned responses in the bodies of listeners. One dimension of this activation that warrants closer attention is affordance: the ways in which musical sound solicits, invites, or entrains movement.

Affordance, in its classical ecological formulation (Gibson, 1979), refers to the action possibilities offered by the environment in relation to an organism’s capacities. A chair affords sitting to a body of the right scale and configuration; a path affords walking. In the context of music, affordances are not spatial but temporal and affective. A rhythmic pulse affords entrainment; a harmonic cadence affords anticipation and resolution; a sudden silence affords stillness, tension, or recalibration.

These affordances are not merely functional. They are felt as invitations to move, sway, breathe, tense, or release — not in conscious response to what the music ‘means’, but through the immediate activation of value-coding systems in the listener. Musical affordances thus operate at the level of embodied disposition. They arise from the attunement of the listener’s sensorimotor system to particular patterns of sound, and they often reflect a history of cultural participation, physical practice, and social interaction.

Such affordances are fundamental to the sociality of music. Shared rhythmic entrainment, for example, can generate collective synchrony without the mediation of language. Dance, gesture, and coordinated vocalisation emerge not from semantic interpretation but from co-participation in affordances of movement and timing. These phenomena exemplify how music makes social cohesion possible without requiring propositional content.

Moreover, affordances help explain the cross-modality of musical experience. Music is not perceived solely through audition; it reverberates across tactile, kinaesthetic, and interoceptive domains. A bass line may be felt in the chest, a melodic contour may lift the posture, a crescendo may quicken the breath. These are not metaphors but embodied activations: value-laden responses of the organism to patterns in the soundscape that afford temporal structuring and affective alignment.

Notably, affordances are not uniform. What music affords to one listener may not be available to another. This variation is grounded in histories of exposure, training, and bodily familiarity. A complex polyrhythm may afford synchronisation to a dancer from one tradition but not to a listener unfamiliar with its underlying logic. Affordance, like resonance, is situated.

In sum, musical affordances are neither purely subjective nor entirely inherent in the sounds themselves. They are relational effects — emergent from the interplay of patterned material phenomena and the perceptual-action systems of embodied, socially situated listeners. They help explain how music does something without saying something.

The final post in this sequence will reflect on the broader implications of this relational model for understanding music’s place in human life.

Conclusion: Music as Embodied Relation — Towards a Relational Ontology of Sound and Sociality

This series has sought to articulate a relational ontology of music grounded in the material and embodied realities of both music makers and listeners. Departing from semiotic and symbolic models that construe music as a system of meaning, the approach presented here foregrounds music as a material phenomenon that activates and entrains value-laden bodily systems.

At the heart of this model lies the distinction between the music maker, who instantiates patterned material phenomena — sounds structured in time — and the music listener, whose embodied perceptual and affective systems respond through simultaneous activations of categorical and value systems. Music is thus not ‘meaningful’ in a semiotic sense but is valueful: it selectively mobilises perceptual categories and evokes adaptive bodily responses.

Time, conceived as the unfolding of processes rather than a linear, external parameter, is central to this relational dynamic. The music maker’s unfolding creation resonates with the listener’s unfolding consciousness, producing dynamic affordances and opportunities for social coordination through shared sensorimotor engagement.

This model aligns with Edelman’s Theory of Neuronal Group Selection by emphasising the role of value-categories that are activated in perception, reflecting an organism’s adaptive responses. Music’s sociality emerges from this embodied resonance, not from symbolic communication or representational coding.

Several implications arise:

Music’s social function is immediate and embodied, grounded in movement, rhythm, and affective activation rather than language-like meaning.
Cultural variation and individual histories shape the affordances music offers, making musical experience deeply situated and context-dependent.
Music engages multiple modalities simultaneously, crossing auditory, tactile, kinaesthetic, and interoceptive domains, underscoring its holistic embodiment.
Understanding music through a relational ontology challenges traditional musicology and cognitive models that privilege symbolic interpretation, inviting interdisciplinary dialogue across neuroscience, philosophy, and social theory.

This relational perspective reframes music not as a system of signs or messages but as an ongoing relational process of embodied interaction and social coordination. It honours the vitality of music as a living phenomenon — a song of the self and the social body, dynamically unfolding in time.

Reflective Coda: Embracing the Relational Pulse of Music

As we conclude this exploration, it is worth reflecting on the profound shift in perspective that a relational ontology invites. By moving away from traditional semiotic frameworks that seek fixed meanings within music, we open space for appreciating music as a living, temporal, and embodied phenomenon — a dynamic interplay between maker and listener, sound and body, unfolding consciousness and social value.

This view challenges us to rethink familiar assumptions: that music must ‘mean’ something to be significant; that communication requires symbolic coding; that musical experience is primarily cognitive rather than embodied. Instead, music emerges as a process of mutual attunement, an ongoing co-creation of value realised through embodied resonance and temporal flow.

In this light, each musical moment is both singular and shared — a fleeting yet potent convergence of perceptual and affective systems, shaped by history, culture, and individual biography, yet transcending them through the immediacy of lived experience.

As scholars, musicians, and listeners, embracing this relational pulse invites humility and curiosity. It invites us to listen differently: to attend not just to notes and rhythms but to the embodied experience of sound as it moves through us and between us.

Ultimately, this perspective underscores music’s irreducible vitality — not as a text to decode, but as a living phenomenon that enacts and enriches the social fabric of life itself.