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.
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