The Sound of Value: A Relational History of Music: 4 From Synchrony to Society: Music as Collective Regulation

Building on rhythm and melody, music evolves into a system of collective regulation, structuring the social field across bodies, time, and affect. Synchrony — the alignment of pulse, gesture, and attention — forms the core mechanism by which groups orchestrate themselves, stabilising interaction, reinforcing hierarchy, and coordinating cooperative action. In this sense, music is not representation; it is social organisation made audible and tangible.

Through coordinated rhythm and melodic contour, participants phase attention, arousal, and expectation, generating a shared temporal and affective landscape. This synchrony amplifies social cohesion: individuals experience the collective not as a sum of separate agents but as a temporally aligned field. Music thus functions as a pre-linguistic regulator, shaping group behaviour through entrainment rather than instruction.

The combination of rhythmic structure and melodic differentiation allows for graded modulation. Variations in tempo, intensity, and contour create dynamic scaffolds for interaction, enabling leaders and participants to guide energy, signal transitions, and shape collective focus. In Edelman’s terms, music mediates the exchange of value, coordinating emotional and attentional investment across the group without invoking semiotic meaning. It is a technology of alignment, extending the reach of social systems beyond immediate perception.

Importantly, this regulatory function is iterative and emergent. Each performance co-constitutes the social field: participants respond to one another, generating patterns that are contingent, adaptive, and reproducible. Through these repeated cycles, music cultivates anticipatory competence, enabling the group to sustain complex coordination over time. Synchrony becomes ritualised, embedding patterns of behaviour, expectation, and engagement that structure social life itself.

Music’s role in collective regulation lays the foundation for later cultural innovations. As semiotic systems emerge — language, symbolic ritual, and notation — they piggyback upon the pre-existing scaffolds of musical entrainment. Music provides the temporal and affective substrate upon which symbolic meaning can be layered: the social coordination, attention, and expectation honed in musical practice become the scaffolds for more abstract collective cognition.

Through these mechanisms, music demonstrates its ontological primacy in human social life. It is not merely an art form or a precursor to language; it is the medium through which collective life is phased, modulated, and sustained. By orchestrating synchrony, music makes possible cooperation at scales and durations far exceeding those achievable by individual action alone. In relational terms, it actualises social potential, enabling emergent structures of interdependence that underpin human societies.

In sum, the evolution from rhythm to melody to synchrony exemplifies how music scaffolds the becoming of society. Each pulse, phrase, and contour is a micro-gesture of collective regulation, a temporal technology for value exchange, and a rehearsal of relational complexity. Music, in its non-semiotic core, is thus both foundation and facilitator: it structures the social world, cultivates mutual responsiveness, and primes humans for the symbolic and semiotic innovations that follow.