Before the Bond: Frequency Compatibility as Generative Architecture in Animal Social Networks

The dominant paradigm in animal social network analysis assumes social bonds form first through proximity or affiliation, after which acoustic signals merely flow through them. This paper proposes a theoretical inversion: acoustic frequency compatibility acts as a prior generative architecture — the substrate that determines which bonds can form and stabilize. Using the Resonance Centrality framework (Keiser, 2026), we argue that high resonance scores reflect not only current network position but the historical frequency compatibility that shaped network topology. We derive three testable hypotheses linking pre-bond frequency overlap to bond emergence, network evolution, and resilience to node loss. This framework reframes acoustic communication from content transmitted across bonds to the architectural material from which bonds are built. This is a preprint manuscript (v3).