Showing posts with label resonance. Show all posts

01 August 2025

Fields of Meaning: Scientific Modelling Through a Relational Lens

1 What Is a Model?: From Compression to Construal

Scientific models are often thought of as simplified representations—“maps” or “pictures”—of reality, tools that help us navigate complexity by reducing it to manageable form. But within a relational ontology grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and informed by Edelman’s Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (TNGS), models can be understood far more profoundly: not as static mirrors, but as dynamic instances of meaning potential that both compress and construe the unfolding coherence of phenomena.

Compression as Coherence

At their core, models are compressions of relational processes and fields of unfolding. Just as particles emerge as compressed patterns within continuous fields, models condense vast webs of interaction and variation into structured, accessible forms. This compression is not arbitrary but is shaped by coherence: the patterned relations that hold together phenomena across dimensions of space, time, and causality. Models extract and amplify these coherences, enabling observers to grasp and work with them.

Construal as Meaning-Making

But compression alone is not modelling. For a model to function as a semiotic system—one that is meaningful and usable—it must be construed by conscious agents within communities of practice. This construal draws on value systems, purpose, and shared conventions to interpret the compressed patterns as meaningful configurations, whether numerical, visual, conceptual, or linguistic.

Models as Semiotic Instances

This perspective reframes models from static “pictures” to semiotic instances: dynamic, interpretable construals arising from material coherence but transcending mere physicality. Models are not simply “out there” but are enacted through the interaction of observer, community, and the phenomena under study. They instantiate meaning potentials shaped by cultural, cognitive, and methodological systems.

Implications

Understanding models as compressed and construed relational processes invites a new epistemology: one that foregrounds the role of the observer, the semiotic system, and the collective meaning potential from which models emerge. It also opens paths to explore how models evolve, how they relate across domains, and how they mediate the unfolding of scientific knowledge.

2 The Model in Practice: Interactions, Limits, and the Ecology of Knowledge

Building on our understanding of models as compressions and semiotic construals, we now turn to the practical dimensions of modelling in science and knowledge-making. How do models operate within fields of interaction? What are their limits? And how do they participate in the broader ecology of knowledge?

Models as Interactional Processes

Models are not isolated artefacts; they emerge, evolve, and function through ongoing interactions among observers, instruments, data, and phenomena. Each iteration—whether a mathematical formula, a conceptual framework, or a computational simulation—is shaped by this relational interplay. Models adapt to new observations, refine predictions, and respond to challenges, reflecting the dynamic and situated nature of knowledge.

Limits and Boundary Conditions

Every model embodies constraints—boundary conditions that define its domain of applicability and the assumptions it carries. These limits are essential: they acknowledge that models compress complex realities and that no model can capture every detail. Recognising these boundaries prevents the conflation of second-order semiotic reality (the model) with first-order material reality (the processes being modelled), and invites continual critical engagement and revision.

The Ecology of Models

Models coexist within an ecology of knowledge, interacting with other models, theories, and practices across disciplines. This ecology is not hierarchical but networked, with models influencing and transforming one another. Interdisciplinary dialogues reveal complementarities and tensions, highlighting how models mediate meaning across contexts.

The Role of Meaning and Value

As semiotic construals, models also carry meaning potentials that extend beyond empirical fit. They embody values, priorities, and interpretive frameworks that influence how phenomena are understood and acted upon. Awareness of these dimensions enriches the practice of modelling, situating it within human purposes and cultural contexts.

Towards Reflexive Modelling

Informed by a relational ontology, reflexive modelling acknowledges the mutual shaping of models and observers. It encourages openness to alternative perspectives, iterative refinement, and the embracing of complexity without succumbing to reductionism.

3 Compression and Coherence: Modelling as Meaning-Making

Having explored models as relational construals and situated practices, we now turn to the underlying dynamics that allow models to function at all: compression and coherence. In the relational ontology we are developing, these are not just technical or cognitive processes — they are meaning-making activities, unfolding within and across fields of potential.

Compression: From Process to Pattern

To model is to compress unfolding phenomena — to abstract patterns from complex processes. This is not simplification for its own sake, but a necessary condition of intelligibility. Just as language compresses experience into meaning, models compress relational unfoldings into selective representations. A model, then, is not a mirror of reality, but an enactment of coherence within constraint.

Compression does not negate complexity; it manages it. By selecting what differences make a difference, models allow us to interact meaningfully with the world — to anticipate, to question, to interpret. But every act of compression implies exclusions: unmodelled variables, unacknowledged assumptions, unseen interactions.

Coherence: Holding Meaning Together

If compression makes a model functionally possible, coherence makes it meaningful. A model must hold together across its internal structure and its external deployments. It must cohere with other models, with empirical observations, and with the broader systems of knowledge in which it operates.

Coherence is not reducible to consistency or predictive success. In a relational ontology, coherence is the resonance of a model within a field of meaning — its capacity to stabilise intelligibility across instances. A model coheres when it enables understanding, links phenomena, and supports purposeful action, even if it is partial or provisional.

The Model as Semiotic Instance

From this perspective, each model is an instance of meaning — not a derivation from reality, but an actualisation of meaning potential in a particular relational configuration. It is a semiotic act, grounded in material processes but structured by symbolic systems. This holds whether the model is a graph, a mathematical expression, a verbal explanation, or a simulation: all are instances of construal.

This view also dissolves the divide between scientific and everyday models. The child’s mental model of gravity, the engineer’s stress diagram, and the physicist’s field equations are all compressions of potential into instance, meaningful because they resonate within their contexts.

A Modelling Ethic

If models are acts of meaning, they carry responsibility. We must attend not only to how well a model works, but also to what it foregrounds, what it hides, whom it serves, and how it might evolve. Modelling, then, is not just a methodological activity — it is an ethical and ontological one.

Reflective Coda — Modelling as Construal, Relation, and Responsibility

Throughout this trilogy, we have re-examined scientific modelling through the lens of relational ontology: not as a search for ultimate reality, but as a patterned unfolding of meaning. Models, in this view, do not depict things-in-themselves but instantiate relational coherences — selective construals of experience within specific fields of potential.

We began by reframing models not as mirrors of reality, but as relational construals: semiotic instances that emerge from the activation of social and cognitive potentials. These construals are not arbitrary. They compress patterned regularities across processes, stabilising meaning within a shared context of interpretation.

We then examined the situated practices through which models are produced and refined — not as neutral activities, but as forms of social semiosis shaped by tools, traditions, constraints, and purposes. The scientist does not merely extract truth from the world but configures meaningful relations within it. Modelling, like all meaning-making, is a material and symbolic process.

Finally, we turned to compression and coherence as fundamental operations in modelling. Compression renders complexity tractable; coherence holds meaning together across time, context, and application. Modelling is thus always perspectival: it selects, relates, omits, and reframes. Its power lies not in its completeness, but in its meaningful partiality.

This relational approach does not weaken the epistemic power of science — it situates it. By understanding models as semiotic acts within unfolding systems, we gain a clearer view of both their capacity and their limits. We can ask not just whether a model works, but how and why it means what it does, for whom, and with what consequences.

The implications are both theoretical and ethical. To model is to construe. And to construe is to take a stance within a world of unfolding relations.

26 July 2025

A Relational Reimagining of Cosmology

1 Cosmology as Construal

In developing a relational ontology grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and informed by theories of process, perception, and meaning, we have consistently challenged the assumption that science describes a mind-independent reality. Instead, we have treated scientific models as semiotic construals: disciplined, symbolic enactments of meaning within specific contexts of inquiry. Nowhere is this perspective more needed—and more revealing—than in the domain of cosmology.

Cosmology, on first encounter, appears to be the most objective of sciences. It concerns itself with the large-scale structure of the universe, the passage of cosmic time, and the origin and fate of everything. Yet these grand narratives emerge not from detached observation but from a deeply mediated process of semiotic work. Every model of the cosmos is a meaning instance within a historically evolving field of scientific meaning potential—a construal, not a mirror.

The Universe as a Field of Potential, Not a Container of Things

Classical cosmology operates on a foundational metaphor: the universe as a vast container filled with matter, energy, and fields. But our relational ontology begins elsewhere. It views the universe not as a container but as a field of unfolding processes, each related to others through coherence, resonance, and instantiation. Space is not a backdrop, but a topology of relations. Time is not a separate dimension, but the axis along which processes unfold.

From this view, cosmology is not the description of an objective universe out there, but the attempt to instantiate semiotic coherence across the relational fields that unfold around us and within us.

From Observation to Meaning Instance

Scientific cosmology is built on observation—but observation is always mediated. Photons arriving from distant stars are captured, filtered, interpreted, and modelled. What we call “data” is not raw input but already-semiotic material. The “cosmic microwave background” is not a discovered thing but a construed field: a patterned construal that emerges through recursive meaning-making between instrumentation, theory, and interpretation.

To claim, then, that we “know” the age of the universe or the structure of space-time is to confuse semiotic model with material process. This does not reduce the validity of cosmological inquiry—it sharpens it. The task is not to describe some imagined reality beyond construal — a metaphysical fiction — but to understand how meaning is instantiated across systems as they unfold in relation.

A Semiotic Ecology of Models

Models like the Big Bang, cosmic inflation, dark matter, and dark energy are not isolated conjectures but part of a semiotic ecology. Each draws on shared systems of meaning: mathematics, physics, observational technologies, philosophical assumptions. Each brings certain aspects of the cosmos into focus while rendering others backgrounded or unmodellable.

Our relational ontology invites us to treat these models not as approximations of truth but as expressions of individuation within the scientific community. They are ways of constraining potential into instance, shaped by material affordances, social imperatives, and the ongoing evolution of meaning.

Looking Ahead

In the posts that follow, we will revisit some of cosmology’s most profound constructs—black holes, the Big Bang, and cosmic expansion—through this relational lens. We will ask not what they are, but how they instantiate across relational fields. We will treat them not as objects of knowledge, but as meaningful compressions of unfolding processes, whose very intelligibility depends on the semiotic systems in which they are embedded.

Cosmology, then, is not the story of what the universe is. It is the story of how we, as semiotic beings embedded in unfolding processes, make meaning at the outermost edges of what we can construe.

2 Black Holes and the Collapse of Construal

In the previous post, we proposed a reframing of cosmology as a semiotic enterprise: not a mirror of an objective cosmos, but a set of disciplined construals that instantiate meaning from potential. In this frame, cosmological constructs like black holes must be understood not as fixed entities “out there” in a pre-given universe, but as meaning instances that compress and coordinate fields of experience within the scientific community. Few cosmological construals test this perspective more profoundly than the black hole.

From Prediction to Construal

Black holes entered scientific discourse not as observations but as mathematical inferences—solutions to the equations of general relativity under extreme conditions. Their subsequent evolution, from speculative singularities to central objects in astrophysics, illustrates the semiotic power of modelling. The black hole is not a thing; it is a boundary condition of a model—a projection of relational stress within an unfolding field.

From a relational-ontological perspective, the black hole instantiates the collapse of construal: it marks the limit at which the semiotic systems used to model gravitational interaction can no longer produce coherent symbolic interpretation. The breakdown of spacetime geometry at the singularity is not a feature of the material cosmos but a signal that the model’s meaning potential has reached its outer bound.

Event Horizon as Semiotic Boundary

The event horizon—often described as the boundary beyond which nothing can escape—is better understood as a boundary of construal. It marks the point beyond which observational processes can no longer instantiate meaning in the classical sense. What happens beyond the horizon cannot be modelled by light-based observations, and thus resists integration into the shared meaning potential of our scientific systems.

In this sense, black holes don’t just curve geodesics; they curve the field of construal itself, pulling semiotic coherence toward a singular limit. They instantiate relational compression so extreme that time, space, mass, and even process lose their conventional semantic coherence.

The Semiotics of Collapse

At its heart, the black hole is a semiotic paradox: it is the most predicted and indirectly observed entity in astrophysics, yet it fundamentally resists direct construal. The tension between prediction and observability forces the scientific community to instantiate coherence across models—linking gravitational lensing, accretion disk radiation, and gravitational wave signatures into a shared constellation of meaning.

This isn’t error; it’s how science functions as a semiotic ecology. The black hole emerges not as an ontological substance but as an effect of coordinated construal across multiple, interacting systems of interpretation.

Meaning Beyond the Horizon

So what lies beyond the black hole’s horizon? From our relational perspective, the better question is: what does it mean to posit such a region? The singularity is not a place; it is a collapse of coherence, where potential meaning cannot be instantiated with our current systems.

Black holes thus reveal something fundamental about the ontology of science: that every field of inquiry has limits of construal, and that these limits are not failures but structural boundaries of meaning-making. The more extreme the compression of relational fields, the more radically our semiotic systems are tested—and perhaps transformed.

A Space for New Construals

The continuing study of black holes—especially in relation to quantum mechanics and information theory—presses on the outermost edge of scientific meaning potential. It invites the development of new systems of construal: not merely extensions of general relativity or quantum theory, but novel architectures of meaning, able to hold together previously unconnected fields.

What we observe is not a collapse of reality, but a demand for deeper coherence. In this way, black holes are not just phenomena to be explained; they are generators of semiotic innovation, forcing us to rethink what it means to know.

3 Cosmological Expansion and the Scaling of Meaning

If black holes represent the collapse of construal—points at which semiotic coherence reaches a relational singularity—then cosmological expansion presents the opposite challenge: not compression, but scaling. The expanding universe does not rupture our models through intensity, but through scope. It asks how far meaning can extend before its coherence thins into abstraction.

What Expands in Expansion?

Standard cosmology construes expansion as the stretching of spacetime itself: galaxies are not moving through space so much as space unfolding between them. From a relational ontology, this construal is already highly abstracted: it interprets redshift, background radiation, and spatial distribution through a semiotic system—not as reality itself, but as a way of coordinating observations across time and frame.

But what does “expansion” instantiate in a system that models reality as unfolding relations? Not a ballooning of substance, but a scaling of relational topology. The fabric of co-unfolding processes spreads, not as metric extension, but as the increasing separation of interactive potential.

In other words, expansion is not of a container (space), but of the relational field that coordinates processual interaction.

Scaling Meaning Potentials

This scaling creates a unique semiotic challenge: how do we maintain coherent construal across increasing separation? How do we relate observations from early universe microwave background to current galactic structures without losing the meaning potential of either?

In the SFL-based framework, such work requires realising coherence across strata. In cosmology, coherence is realised across systemic models: from inflation theory to dark energy parametrisation to standard candles. Each instantiates meaning from a distinct set of potential, yet all are held together as instances of a single construal of unfolding.

The Horizon Problem as Semiotic Discontinuity

The horizon problem, for example—why regions of the universe not in causal contact display similar properties—can be reframed not just as a physical puzzle, but as a semiotic inconsistency: a mismatch in the instantiation of coherence across a relational field.

Inflation theory attempts to resolve this by reconfiguring the unfolding itself. It introduces a new construal of early process, compressing relational proximity into a prior epoch of co-interaction. This shows how cosmology innovates not just by observing more, but by reshaping the field of meaning to restore semiotic consistency.

Dark Energy and the Strain of Abstraction

The concept of dark energy represents a new form of semiotic strain. It is not observed directly; it is invoked to sustain coherence between the model and the observed acceleration of expansion. In relational terms, dark energy is a placeholder for a missing processual relation—an inferred dynamic necessary to uphold the model’s integrity across scale.

Like the singularity of a black hole, dark energy reveals the limits of current construal. It marks a region of potential that remains uninstantiated—a gap in meaning that propels the ongoing evolution of the semiotic system we call physics.

Expansion as a Semiotic Pressure

Thus, cosmological expansion is not just a physical phenomenon; it is a semiotic pressure. It demands the coordination of increasingly disparate instances of observation into a shared meaning potential. The challenge is not just to explain more, but to maintain coherence across scale, to trace unfolding relations even as their proximity thins.

In this sense, the expanding universe becomes a metaphor for the task of knowledge itself: not to capture the whole in a single frame, but to sustain meaningful construal across diverse and widening perspectives.

The Cosmos as Construal

In the relational ontology we are developing, the cosmos is not a container of things but a field of co-unfolding processes. Cosmology, then, is the attempt to instantiate coherence across that field—to construe unfolding at the limits of scale, time, and relation.

What expands is not space alone, but the field of semiotic engagement. And what science accomplishes is not the mapping of reality, but the organised construal of its unfolding.

Reflective Coda: Construal at the Edge of Everything

Across this trilogy, we have reframed three of cosmology’s most foundational concepts—black holes, the big bang, and expansion—not as brute physical realities, but as semiotic construals: patterned interpretations of how processes unfold and relate at different scales.

Each concept, in its own way, presses on the boundaries of our relational ontology:

Black holes reveal the compression of meaning, the limits of construal where processual coherence breaks down under intensity.
The big bang reframes origin not as a substance-based event, but as an inflection in the topology of unfolding: a convergence of potential and interaction whose reverberations persist in every instance of process.
Cosmological expansion shows that what unfolds is not space as container, but relation as field. The challenge is not tracking material drift, but maintaining semiotic coherence across widening scales.

Together, these re-interpretations lead us to a radical insight: cosmology is not the study of a thing called ‘the universe’ but the organised construal of how relational processes unfold at scale.

From Physics to Semiotics

This shift has significant consequences. What has long been treated as physics—the modelling of space, time, mass, energy—is here reunderstood as a semiotic system: a disciplined language for instantiating meaning from the field of observable process. What we call “laws of nature” are not directives from the cosmos but constraints on coherent construal within that system.

This is not relativism. It is not to deny the consistency of experience or the success of scientific modelling. It is to ground that consistency in relation, not in substance; in the logic of meaning-making, not the assumption of mind-independent objects.

The cosmos unfolds. Meaning construes. And what we call cosmology is their intersection.

A New Vision of the Universe

To see the universe through this lens is not to diminish its majesty. On the contrary, it draws us more deeply into its logic. We are no longer outside observers looking at a universe. We are participants in a field of unfolding, whose own meaning potentials instantiate the construals by which the universe comes to mean.

In this view, the universe is not something we find, but something we unfold with—a field of meaning instantiated process by process, relation by relation, across the clines of time, individuation, and semiotic abstraction.

The universe is not a noun. It is a clause complex.

15 July 2025

Resonant Systems: Music, Value, and Meaning

In our ongoing development of a relational ontology grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and informed by Edelman’s Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (TNGS), we’ve taken a fresh look at the nature of music—what it is, what it does, and how it means.

A key clarification in this view is that music is not itself a semiotic system. It does not consist of signs that symbolise meanings in the way language, mathematics, or gesture do. Rather, music is a social system that selects and activates patterns of biological value. These values are inherited biases in neural functioning—evolutionarily selected tendencies that guide attention, behaviour, and learning according to what has proven adaptively advantageous to our ancestors. Musical sound targets the functioning of value systems directly.

So while music does not construe meaning in the sense used in SFL, it does activate the systems from which symbolic meaning can be construed. It brings somatic potential into shared social space, where consciousness may interpret its effects through the lens of emotion, memory, or other mental processes. In doing so, music participates in the broader ecology of meaning—not by encoding messages, but by resonating across bodies and contexts in ways that matter.

This resonance is not symbolic but somatic: a functional synchrony between two complex systems operating in time. The patterned material dynamics of music unfold in ways that can entrain the listener’s own biological rhythms—heart rate, breath, neural oscillation. When these dynamics resonate with the dynamics of value systems, they amplify or modulate value-category activations. These activations are the basis of what consciousness later construes as feeling, emotion, or drive.

Emotion, in this view, is a mental process that interprets these activations semiotically. And when language enters the scene, it gives symbolic form to these construals—projecting them into shared meaning and memory.

This account allows us to preserve the crucial distinction between symbolic systems (like language) and value-selecting systems (like music), while also recognising that both are part of the complex network of meaning-making in human life. Music, in this view, becomes a site where biology, culture, and consciousness meet—not in signification, but in activation and resonance. It operates not by representing meaning, but by resonating with the very systems from which meaning is ultimately construed.

13 July 2025

Music and the Materiality of Value: A Relational Ontology

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

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

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

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:

Meaning arises only through mental construal;
Value is a biological potential selected and activated in social fields;
Music is a material system for instantiating value across differentiated roles and across time.

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

Coda: Music Beyond Meaning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.