1 The Feeling of Value
Why does music move us?
Not just metaphorically — viscerally. A single note can bring tears. A rhythm can lift a crowd. A harmonic shift can make the world seem to stop.
This power isn’t accidental. It arises from how music engages the value systems of the brain and body.
In Edelman’s theory of neuronal group selection, perception isn’t just about recognising what something is — it’s also about sensing what it means for the organism. Perceptual systems are saturated with value. They don’t just categorise the world; they rank, weigh, and filter it through the lens of feeling.
This is where music finds its power. Because it doesn’t represent or refer — it resonates. And in doing so, it activates patterns of feeling already shaped by our biological histories and social lives.
When we say a musical phrase is “beautiful” or “haunting,” we’re pointing to this activation — the way music aligns with internal states, amplifying and transforming them.
But value isn’t just personal. It’s socially shaped, historically sedimented, and culturally expressed. In the next post, we’ll explore how emotion and value work together to make music meaningful — not as a code, but as a felt force.
2 Emotion, Value, and the Body
Music doesn’t just pass through us — it grips us. Our hearts race. Skin tingles. Breath catches. Movement surges. Why?
Because emotion begins in the body. Long before we interpret or explain a feeling, our nervous systems are already engaged — tuning, orienting, bracing, releasing. Emotions are not added onto experience. They are the form that value takes in lived time.
This is central to understanding music’s power. It acts directly on the affective systems of the listener — systems that are shaped not only by evolution, but by development and culture. From Edelman’s perspective, these systems emerge through selection: affective circuits that consistently support adaptive interaction become reinforced.
In music perception, then, it’s not just sound that’s perceived — it’s value-laden experience. A minor chord doesn’t represent sadness; it activates a bodily system shaped by histories of association, context, and internal states. That activation is the sadness.
This means that music’s affective power doesn’t depend on meaning in a semiotic sense. It’s embodied, emergent, and immediate — rooted in the listener’s own experiential architecture. And because listeners are shaped by social environments, these affective responses are never merely private. They are also social facts.
In the next post, we’ll explore how shared value systems allow music to move not only individuals, but entire communities — making emotion a medium of social synchrony.
3 From Individual Feeling to Collective Value
When a singer’s voice quivers with emotion, and a crowd hushes in response — something more than personal feeling is taking place. The emotion becomes shared. This is how music moves from private perception to public resonance.
At the heart of this shift is the body’s openness to social modulation. From infancy, our affective systems are shaped in interaction: we attune to the voices, rhythms, and responses of others. These early experiences become the scaffolding for a lifetime of affective learning.
In a relational ontology, this means emotion is not simply expressed in music, but activated within and between listeners. Music doesn’t “communicate” emotion the way language communicates meaning. Rather, it entrains bodies and brains — shaping pulse, breath, posture, and orientation — in ways that align experience across individuals.
This alignment is what allows music to function as a carrier of collective value. Listeners don’t merely feel; they co-feel. And this co-feeling, over time, becomes part of what music means to a community — not semantically, but socially.
Think of protest songs, religious chants, national anthems. Their emotional impact is not just in what they sound like, but in what they summon: histories, struggles, identities, hopes. In this sense, affective response becomes a kind of cultural memory — felt, not told.
In the next post, we’ll look at how music’s affective power is shaped and sustained by neurobiological mechanisms, connecting embodied feeling to the deep structure of consciousness itself.
4 Neurobiology of Affect: Value Systems and Musical Activation
What makes a musical phrase feel right? Why does a minor chord stir sorrow, or a crescendo raise goosebumps? These experiences arise not from music’s structure alone, but from how that structure interacts with the value systems of the brain.
In Gerald Edelman’s theory of Neuronal Group Selection, perception and memory are not passive reflections of the world, but active processes guided by value-category systems. These systems link sensory patterns with value-based responses — essentially telling the brain, this matters.
When we listen to music, our auditory system doesn’t merely analyse pitch and rhythm. It engages value-laden repertoires built from past experiences, shaped by bodily states, social contexts, and affective learning. The brain doesn’t decode music; it resonates with it.
In this view, musical affect is not an “add-on” to perception — it’s built into it. The listener’s perceptual systems are always entraining with patterns of activated value: intensities, tensions, releases, and relational dynamics that are felt before they are known.
Crucially, these activations are not just emotional in the narrow sense of joy or sadness. They reflect deep, embodied orientations to the world — readiness to move, attend, withhold, approach, retreat. Music taps into these primordial circuits, modulating them in time.
This is why musical affect feels so direct: it bypasses language, riding on pathways that link auditory input with the brainstem, limbic system, and cortical maps of bodily space. It’s not just “in our heads” — it’s in our posture, pulse, and breath.
In the final post of this series, we’ll consider how these neurobiological foundations interact with cultural shaping to produce musical experiences that are both intensely personal and widely shared.
5 Feeling Together: Shared Affect and Cultural Patterning
If musical value is grounded in individual biology, how can it also be shared? How do music makers and listeners — with different histories and bodies — experience such powerful forms of affective resonance?
The answer lies in cultural patterning.
Just as bodily experience shapes neural value systems, cultural participation shapes the kinds of sounds that come to activate those systems. Through countless experiences of music in ceremony, play, performance, media, and memory, listeners become attuned to specific forms of movement, timing, and contour that carry affective weight.
These aren’t fixed “meanings,” but conventional affordances: rising melodies that feel uplifting, heavy bass that feels grounding, certain rhythms that invite dance or reflection. Cultural practices scaffold these associations, making some patterns more likely to resonate — and more likely to be produced by music makers aiming to move others.
This is not a matter of universal codes, nor is it entirely subjective. Rather, it reflects a shared history of embodied participation. Value systems are shaped not only by biology but by the social-material conditions in which perception unfolds.
This is why musical styles, genres, and traditions matter. They serve as reservoirs of collective resonance, organising sound in ways that cohere with shared experiences, identities, and emotional lives. When a listener “gets” a groove or is moved by a harmony, they are drawing on this deep well of socially sedimented affective patterning.
Of course, such resonances are never static. Cultures change. Technologies evolve. Personal biographies unfold. But the social function of music endures: to bring bodies into relation through affect, to enable us to feel — and feel together.
Reflective Coda – The Pulse of Valuing
Throughout this series, we have approached music not as language, symbol, or code — but as a social system of sound that resonates with the embodied, value-laden lives of listeners. From the first flicker of affect in a newborn’s cry to the shared surges of emotion in concert halls and community rituals, music traces the contours of what matters.
We’ve seen how value is not added to sound, but activated through it — shaped by evolution, refined by personal experience, and patterned through cultural participation. Music is thus neither reducible to biology nor separable from it. It is a phenomenon that unfolds in time, but resonates across lifetimes and social worlds.
Music’s power lies in its ability to entrain us — not only in rhythm, but in feeling and in meaning. It draws listeners into processes that both reflect and reshape their values, desires, and relations. To attend to music is to attend to how consciousness itself moves: through activation, resonance, and adaptation.
As we continue to explore music in its technological, historical, and ethical dimensions, this insight will remain central: music is not what we know, but how we feel what we are — together, and in time.
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