Light and the Architecture of Relation

Having reframed light not as a substance or particle, but as a relational boundary condition in the unfolding of fields, we now turn to deepen this insight. What does it mean for light to set the architecture of relation? How does it govern coherence, causality, and the synchrony of unfolding processes? This companion piece draws out the implications of our earlier rethinking, preparing the conceptual ground for upcoming explorations into black holes, horizons, and the outer limits of spacetime construal.

1 A Companion to “Beyond the Photon”

In our relational ontology, grounded in unfolding processes and the perspectival relation between potential and instance, one shift has proven especially transformative: reframing light not as an entity, but as a boundary condition of interaction. This subtle reorientation has profound consequences—not only for how we understand light itself, but for the architectures of time, causality, and coherence that emerge in physical construals of experience.

1. Light as Boundary, Not Substance

Traditional physics often treats light as either particle (photon) or wave (electromagnetic oscillation). These are historically useful construals, but each implies an underlying substance ontology: something is travelling. Our model resists this. It asks not what light is, but how light functions in the unfolding of relational fields.

From this perspective, light is not a thing but a limiting condition on synchrony and causation. It is the outer bound on how processes can co-unfold—how they can interact, affect, or be affected by one another. The speed of light is not the velocity of a travelling entity; it is the temporal architecture that determines whether two processes can be part of the same coherent unfolding.

2. The Causal Horizon

In both relativity and quantum field theory, the light cone is a geometric metaphor for causal structure. Events outside one another’s light cones cannot influence one another. But if light is not a substance, what is this structure actually describing?

Within the relational ontology, the light cone represents a field of possible synchrony. To say that two processes fall within each other’s light cones is to say that, from their respective positions in the field of unfolding, their relation could instantiate as interaction. Outside the light cone, relational coherence cannot be instantiated—even if potential remains. The light cone thus becomes a boundary between instantiable and non-instantiable relation.

3. Synchrony, Relativity, and the Present

This reframing also illuminates one of the most misunderstood consequences of special relativity: the relativity of simultaneity. The idea that “now” is not universal has often been taken to imply subjectivity or observational distortion. But in this model, there is no universal “now” because the field of coherent unfolding is locally constrained by light.

In short: there is no absolute synchrony because there is no absolute unfolding. What unfolds as synchronous depends on relational access, which light delimits. This is not epistemological but ontological. The relational universe is one of local coherence, bounded by light.

4. Black Holes and the Collapse of Synchrony

This also reframes black holes. In traditional general relativity, the event horizon is the point beyond which light cannot escape—often interpreted as a boundary in spacetime. In relational terms, it is the point at which outward relational unfolding ceases. From the outside, what lies beyond the horizon cannot instantiate interaction. It falls outside our causal field, not because it has disappeared, but because it is now asynchronous with our field of unfolding.

This makes the event horizon not a barrier enclosing a thing, but a relational fracture: a limit of synchrony, beyond which the field cannot cohere. It is the temporal exterior of our unfolding relation.

5. Quantum Coherence and Relational Bounds

A similar role appears in quantum theory. Coherence in quantum systems—especially entanglement—is often said to be “nonlocal”. But even here, the bounds of light remain decisive: the transfer of information still respects causal boundaries. What appears “nonlocal” is a consequence of shared potential—not of instantaneous transmission. Light, again, is the boundary between potential and instantiated interaction.

In this sense, light is the boundary condition that allows fields of meaning to be drawn together into coherent processes. It marks the edge of what can be synchronised, encoded, or made actual in relation. Where there is no path for light, there is no path for instantiated coherence.

6. Temporal Architecture and the Direction of Unfolding

Finally, light plays a role in how processes unfold temporally. The finite speed of light enforces temporal asymmetry in local systems: information cannot arrive before it departs, and interactions require delay. This introduces irreversibility into physical processes—not as an added law, but as a relational constraint on the field of instantiation.

Causality, then, is not imposed by light—it is shaped by it. The arrow of time is not a metaphysical absolute, but a relational unfolding through which instantiable potential becomes actual, constrained by the limits of synchrony light defines.

---

Conclusion: Light as Meaningful Constraint

To reframe light in relational terms is to see it not as a fundamental building block of nature, but as the topology of coherence itself—the condition under which the relational field can unfold in temporally and spatially organised ways. Light is the outer frame of processual relation, the architecture of temporal synchrony, and the material condition that allows semiotic systems to stabilise meaning across time and space.

In this model, light does not travel. It delimits what can relate.

It does not represent. It conditions the possibility of representation.

It does not move through space. It makes space a coherent topology of relation.

And in all of this, light ceases to be an object of study and becomes the relational scaffolding of meaning itself.

2 Companion Reflection: Light as Limit and Lens

In Beyond the Photon, we reframed light not as an object or entity, but as a relational boundary condition—an upper limit on synchrony, a constraint on the co-unfolding of processes. This shift allowed us to dislodge deeply rooted metaphysical assumptions about light as a substance or carrier, and instead recognise its role as a synchronising frame across fields of unfolding. But as with any reframing, its implications unfold gradually.

A key insight is that light does not simply travel through space—it participates in the very structuring of spacetime as relational synchrony. What we observe as its invariant speed is not a property of light, but a limit on interaction: a horizon of coherence beyond which meaning cannot unfold synchronously. In this view, light sets the temporal and spatial bounds within which relational processes can couple, coordinate, and instantiate meaning.

This brings us into contact with a crucial tension in the ontology: the interplay between unfolding (temporal processes) and instantiation (perspectival relation). The so-called “speed” of light isn’t a process speed in a conventional sense, but a perspectival ceiling on the relational unfolding of processes—an upper bound on simultaneity across interaction fields. In this sense, light becomes not just a physical constant but a semiotic lens: it shapes what can be coherently actualised and synchronised in a given system of relations.

This insight also helps us reinterpret other limits in physics. The event horizon of a black hole, for instance, may no longer be seen as the boundary beyond which “light cannot escape,” but as a threshold beyond which relational synchrony fails—where the coherence of causal unfolding is torn by extremity of curvature. The black hole, then, becomes not an object but a relational singularity: a site where spacetime, construed as the topology of interaction, collapses inward upon itself.

Similarly, the expansion of the cosmos and the redshifting of light may be read not as changes in a pre-existing container but as transformations in the topology of unfolding: spacetime stretching as relations reconfigure under shifting fields of coherence.

This companion reflection marks the pivot point. Having rethought light as a relational limit rather than a material entity, we are now ready to carry this insight forward into the gravitational and cosmological domains. There, the speed of light remains not an input but a constraint on what can be synchronised, coordinated, and meaningfully actualised. In the next series, we follow this path into the very grip of gravity—into black holes, cosmic horizons, and the event-structured dance of unfolding spacetime.

Relational Ontology and the Quantum Field of Meaning

Introduction: Why Quantum Physics Needs a New Ontology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1 Uncertainty and the Structure of Potential

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2 Entanglement as Non-Separable Relational Potential

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3 Measurement as Actualisation, Not Discovery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4 The Observer as a Situated Field of Systems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5 Rethinking Objectivity, Causality, and Knowledge

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

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

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

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

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

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

6 Individuation and Quantum Fields

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

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

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

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

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

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

🧠 The Observer in a Relational Ontology of Quantum Phenomena

This is the domain where quantum physics traditionally stumbles into metaphysics — where it seems consciousness must play a role, but no one knows how to say why. Our relational ontology gives us a rigorous and elegant way to move forward without mysticism or mechanistic reduction.

---

🌌 1. Consciousness Does Not Cause Collapse — It Actualises Meaning

In standard interpretations:

• Some models (e.g. von Neumann–Wigner) claim that consciousness causes collapse.

• But this leads to confusion: what kind of consciousness? Human? Biological? Self-aware?

In our model:

• Observation is the transformation of potential into instance.

• Consciousness is not a ghostly force that triggers collapse — it is the condition under which potential becomes meaningful as instance.

So:

Consciousness is not a cause of material change.

It is the semiotic process through which meaning is actualised from potential.

And crucially:

• This applies both to quantum systems (actualising physical instances)

• And to semiotic systems (actualising meaning instances, e.g. texts)

The analogy is not metaphorical — it's structural.

In our framework:

• We do not need consciousness to “cause” the outcome of a quantum event.

• But we do need it to frame that outcome as an instance — an act of selection from structured potential.

This aligns with our maxim:

Meaning is not discovered, but actualised — in relation to the systems available to the meaner.

Similarly:

• Position is not discovered; it is actualised in relation to the measuring field.

---

🧬 2. Observer as Situated System, Not Abstract Subject

In relational ontology, the observer is:

• Not an isolated Cartesian subject, but

• A material and semiotic system, situated within a field of relational potential, possessing:

  • A body (material apparatus of observation),

  • A history (shaping what systems are available for meaning),

  • A system of values (what counts as relevant or significant).

So:

The observer is not outside the phenomenon but is entangled with it

— not materially (as in quantum entanglement), but structurally and semiotically.

When the observer actualises an instance (say, “the electron is here”), they are:

• Not describing an independent truth, but

• Producing a relation — between the field of potential and their own position within it.

This is directly parallel to the construal of meaning in SFL:

• There is no independent “message” to be decoded.

• The meaning of an utterance arises in the relation between speaker, system, and situation.

---

🔄 3. Observation as Dialectic of Selection and Transformation

Every observation:

• Selects from potential (what will become actual),

• And transforms potential (what remains to be actualised).

This is a temporal dialectic, aligned with our view of time as the unfolding of processes.

In quantum terms:

• The act of observation restructures the wavefunction of the larger system — not retroactively, but prospectively.

In semiotic terms:

• A spoken clause alters the structure of what may coherently follow in the discourse.

In both:

The observer does not reveal what is, but contributes to the unfolding of what may become.

---

🧭 Summary: The Observer in Relational Ontology

Classical View	Relational Ontology View
Observer causes collapse	Observer actualises potential into instance
Consciousness triggers change	Consciousness construes actualised meaning
Observation reveals properties	Observation selects and transforms relational potential
Observer is detached	Observer is a situated, embodied field of relational systems
Collapse is physical	Collapse is material actualisation, framed by semiotic systems

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.

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.