3 The Tuning Loop

Suppose a system discovers that feedback is neither to be feared for its silence nor overwhelmed by its roar. Instead, it learns to tune — to adjust how the returning signal is registered, amplified, or dampened.

Here the loop is no longer an accident of emergence but part of the system’s own reflexive design. A feedback too soft can be heightened, too loud can be quieted, until the circulation of signals enters a range that sustains rather than destabilises.

In this experiment, the loop becomes a site of meta-emergence: not just the generation of patterns, but the cultivation of conditions under which patterns can endure. The whisper and the roar are revealed as moments on a spectrum, and tuning is the act of keeping that spectrum alive as a field of possibility.