1 The Social Power of Music Without Meaning
Why does music move us so deeply, so reliably, and so universally—when it doesn’t mean anything?
Music doesn’t refer. It doesn’t name objects, state facts, or assert claims. It doesn’t signify in the way language does. And yet it fills our lives with joy, sorrow, power, intimacy, beauty. It compels us to move, to sing, to cry, to connect. It shapes collective feeling and carves out the deep rhythms of our inner life. All without a single word.
This is the puzzle that opens our series. If music isn’t a semiotic system—if it doesn’t mean—then how does it work? How does it exert such rich and reliable effects, both personally and socially?
Our working hypothesis is this:
Music is not a system of meaning, but a system of value.
It doesn’t tell us what to think—but it shapes what we feel. And more profoundly: it shapes how we move through feeling, how we inhabit affective states, and how we regulate the embodied tension between comfort and disruption, calm and arousal, cohesion and intensity.
In this sense, music functions as a kind of value terrain. It sets in motion felt dynamics—states of tension, anticipation, suspension, resolution—and lets us travel through them, in time. These are not metaphorical versions of emotional life. They are, quite directly, the very dynamics of embodied regulation that underwrite our emotional and social lives in the first place.
So we don’t just respond to music—we live in it. We inhabit it as a space of simulated aliveness. And crucially, we do so in concert with others. Music gives us not only a space to feel, but a shared field to move and regulate feeling together.
We might think of this as a kind of social pheromone system—a non-symbolic but highly coordinated means of aligning bodies and states. Just as ants use chemical trails to guide movement without cognition or signification, humans use music to align affect and behaviour across a group, without meaning a thing.
In this series, we’ll explore how this works. We’ll draw on the work of Gerald Edelman, a neuroscientist who argued that value—not representation—is the primary driver of behavior. We'll trace how music activates the same core dynamics that govern life itself: homeostasis, threat and restoration, arousal and return, and the shaping of possibility through value. And we’ll argue that it’s precisely this—music’s ability to simulate and safely modulate life-affirming states—that makes it so powerful, so rewarding, and so central to human culture.
Music doesn’t have to mean. It just has to move.
And it does.
2 Value Before Meaning: Edelman and the Homeostatic Brain
In our opening post, we proposed that music doesn’t function through meaning, but through value. It shapes what we feel, not what we think. It activates and regulates states of tension and release, not through signs or symbols, but by modulating embodied experience itself.
To ground this idea more precisely, we turn now to the work of Gerald Edelman, a neuroscientist whose theory of consciousness and cognition centred not on representation or logic, but on value-driven dynamics.
For Edelman, the most basic fact about life is this: organisms must stay alive. And staying alive means maintaining a set of internal conditions—temperature, hydration, oxygen, nutrients, social bonding—within viable bounds. These are not just passive baselines. They are actively regulated states, managed by systems he calls homeostats.
Each homeostat is governed by what Edelman calls a value system—a biologically grounded mechanism that evaluates states of the body and environment and triggers actions to restore balance when those states drift too far. This value system is not about meaning. It’s about directionality: it biases behaviour toward life-sustaining outcomes.
The key insight is this:
Value precedes categorisation. Feeling comes before knowing.
Or, in Edelman’s own terms:
“Categorisation is not the same as value, but rather occurs on value.”
In other words, we don’t begin by identifying and labelling the world. We begin by feeling it—by sensing whether things are good or bad for us, whether they move us toward or away from equilibrium. Meaning emerges only later, as a developmental elaboration on top of these primary value systems.
This has major implications for how we understand behaviour, experience, and—crucially—music.
Categorisation on Value
Edelman argues that most of what the brain learns doesn’t arise from direct genetic coding, but through a process he calls somatic selection. Neural groups are generated with a great deal of variability, and through experience—under the influence of value—they are selected, strengthened, and stabilised. What matters is not the symbolic content of a stimulus, but how it affects the body’s homeostatic trajectory.
So categorisation—the formation of stable response patterns to the world—is not purely cognitive. It is an epigenetic event, shaped by the body's evaluative feedback. It doesn’t occur unless the system has value-based circuitry to guide the selection process. But that circuitry, on its own, doesn't determine the outcome. It merely sets the conditions for development—a kind of potential field upon which neural experience will carve its actual shape.
Edelman again:
“Without prior value, somatic selectional systems will not converge into definite behaviours.”
This means that value systems don't just direct behavior—they also shape what becomes meaningful in the first place.
From Value to Experience
So: all action, perception, and learning begin in value. Not in representation. Not in concept. Not in symbol. What this gives us is a picture of a dynamic body, moving and sensing in an environment, constantly adjusting to maintain viability, guided not by what things mean but by what they do—to its equilibrium, to its potential for survival, to its felt condition.
And here we begin to see the resonance with music.
Because music, too, does not operate through representation. It does not provide categorisable input for somatic selection in the way language or image might. It offers instead a direct modulation of value states—states that resemble the body's own homeostatic fluctuations.
Rhythmic drive, tonal instability, melodic contour, harmonic tension and release—these are not signs to be interpreted. They are patterns of value fluctuation, simulated through sound, that we feel in our bodies as shifts in intensity, anticipation, relief, closure, and return.
Music doesn't tell us what’s happening. It happens to us. And that happening is governed not by interpretation, but by the dynamics of value regulation.
In the next post, we’ll explore how these dynamics unfold in time. We'll show how music functions as a simulated value terrain, staging felt states of disturbance and return, of tension and resolution, that echo the very structure of biological survival—and why it feels so profoundly good to move through them.
3 Music as a Simulated Value Terrain
We’ve seen that value comes before meaning—that biological systems are shaped by what sustains life, not by what symbolises it. Edelman’s model showed us how homeostatic regulation, grounded in embodied value systems, underpins all behaviour and perception. Music, we’ve proposed, engages these systems directly, without the detour of symbolic categorisation.
But what exactly does music do?
In this post, we develop the idea that music operates as a simulated value terrain—a landscape of dynamic states that mimic the rhythms of homeostatic disturbance and restoration. By generating patterns of tension and resolution, instability and return, music stages the logic of survival. And in doing so, it creates a felt experience of moving through threat toward safety, imbalance toward balance—an experience that is not just pleasurable, but deeply life-affirming.
Patterning the Felt: From Sound to System
Music unfolds in time. It is inherently processual, never statically present. And at every moment, it modulates the listener’s felt condition—not by naming things or describing situations, but by shaping the internal dynamics of expectation, pressure, and release.
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A rhythmic pulse creates forward motion and temporal predictability.
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A harmonic dissonance introduces tension—something feels unresolved, unstable.
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A melodic rise builds anticipation; a cadential return resolves it.
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A swelling crescendo heightens arousal, then dissipates into stillness.
These are not signs. They are value states, construed directly by the nervous system. They signal not “what” is happening, but how it feels—and even more precisely, what kind of trajectory the body is currently on: toward restoration? or deeper into imbalance?
This is precisely how homeostatic systems operate. They don’t care about representations. They care about directionality: are we returning to equilibrium, or moving away from it? Is this condition improving or worsening? Should we act—or rest?
Music activates this same evaluative orientation—but in a simulated space, where the stakes are affective, not survival-based. It lets us rehearse the very movements that keep us alive—without risk. It models the bodily experience of feeling off-centre and then re-centred, and in so doing, amplifies our sense of vitality.
The Pleasure of Return
The pleasure of music is often the pleasure of coming back—of finding one’s way home after wandering.
This might be literal (a tonic resolution after harmonic tension) or structural (a return to a refrain or theme after variation). But in each case, the sense of restoration is not cognitive; it is felt. The body registers a return to equilibrium—a discharge of pressure, a recalibration of internal dynamics.
This is not metaphor. It is a direct experiential analogue of the body's homeostatic processes. Music makes value audible—not in the sense of moral or symbolic value, but in the sense of regulatory significance: this is stable; this is unstable; this is returning to form.
And because it all happens without actual threat—no danger, no dehydration, no death—music provides the emotional architecture of survival without its risks. It enacts the logic of living, in miniature, and allows us to feel the satisfaction of restoration, again and again.
Simulated Threat, Safe Restoration
Why do we enjoy sadness in music? Why do we seek out dissonance, instability, tension?
Because music lets us touch these affective states safely. It lets us simulate grief, danger, and longing—not to indulge in them, but to move through them. The joy lies not only in the resolution, but in the felt traversal of the terrain itself.
In this way, music becomes a kind of training ground for value regulation—an aesthetic arena in which we rehearse the very patterns of resilience that define being alive.
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It creates deviation from equilibrium (through instability, surprise, suspense).
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It sustains that deviation long enough to be felt.
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It resolves the deviation, restoring balance and grounding.
This is not the work of representation. It is the structural mimicry of homeostatic life. And the body, attuned to these patterns from birth, knows how to feel them—long before it knows how to name them.
In the next post, we’ll make this distinction even sharper. We’ll explore how music does not mean sadness or symbolise restoration, but rather enacts those states directly. It works not through signification, but through somatic modulation. It doesn’t tell us what to feel. It gives us a place to feel it—together, in motion, alive.
4 Felt Patterns, Not Signified Messages
By now we’ve proposed that music is best understood not as a system of meaning, but as a system of value—one that simulates the very dynamics of homeostatic regulation. It stages affective states of tension, anticipation, instability, and return. It lets us rehearse survival without risk. And it does so not through ideas or concepts, but through direct modulation of embodied experience.
In this post, we clarify a crucial distinction:
Music doesn’t signify emotion—it patterns affect.It doesn’t express meanings—it modulates states.It doesn’t tell us what to feel—it gives us a structure in which to feel it.
This may seem like a subtle point. But it marks a fundamental divide between semiotic systems, which operate through symbolic representation, and non-semiotic systems like music, which operate directly on value-regulating dynamics.
Music as Constraint, Not Communication
We often speak of music as a “language of emotion.” But this metaphor misleads. Music does not convey emotion in the way language conveys information. There is no codebook, no grammar of reference. There is no shared system of signs that map to fixed meanings.
Instead, music works more like a scaffold for embodied states. It provides a temporal structure within which the body can experience rhythms of arousal and release, tension and return, elevation and grounding.
The effects are repeatable and socially shared—not because we interpret the same symbols, but because we participate in the same value trajectory.
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A swelling crescendo doesn’t mean urgency; it feels urgent.
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A descending minor third doesn’t signify sadness; it invites a posture of retreat.
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A rhythmic break doesn’t stand for disruption; it creates the condition of destabilisation.
These are not messages. They are felt constraints—coaxing the body into states it already knows how to inhabit.
Beyond Expression: Music as Enactment
When a string quartet builds unbearable tension, we are not receiving an expression—we are entering a state-space shaped by the dynamics of sound.
This is why music can produce states that words cannot. It doesn’t describe grief—it enacts its temporal logic. It doesn’t narrate hope—it sets it in motion, builds it, suspends it, tests it, releases it. These states don’t require interpretation. They register—directly, affectively, somatically.
This is not just a metaphor. The nervous system responds to these patterns in ways that closely parallel its responses to real-world value shifts. Heart rate, breath, posture, attention—all follow the curves of the musical terrain. In this sense, music runs the simulation of living.
And crucially: it lets us rehearse how to move through it.
Non-Semiotic, Fully Social
At this point, we can return to an earlier comparison: music as a kind of social pheromone. Just as ant colonies use chemical trails to organise complex behaviour without symbolic thought, music enables humans to coordinate affective states, synchronise timing, and align attention—without signs, without referents.
In both cases, we see a system that is:
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Non-symbolic (not representational)
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Dynamic (unfolds through time)
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Socially consequential (regulates group behaviour)
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Value-driven (shapes action by modulating internal states)
Music, in this light, is not just “emotional expression.” It is a collective value system—a shared space for moving, feeling, and restoring together. It aligns bodies by activating the same rhythms that regulate life itself.
What We Learn By Listening
So when we listen to music, we are not decoding a message. We are entering a pattern. We are entraining ourselves to a series of value fluctuations that simulate—and sometimes transform—the conditions of being alive.
And this is why music feels realer than real. Because it offers us a distilled encounter with the logic of survival: the capacity to sustain pressure, to find our way through imbalance, and to return, at last, to form.
In our final post, we’ll draw the threads together. We’ll reflect on why music matters—not just as art or entertainment, but as a deeply embodied, deeply social practice that sustains the rhythms of life.
5 Why It Matters: Music as Life-Affirming Practice
Throughout this series, we’ve proposed a different way of understanding music. Not as a language. Not as a code. Not as a container of meanings. But as a system of value dynamics—a non-semiotic, embodied, relational system that simulates and shapes the rhythms of life itself.
We’ve seen that music doesn’t signify. It acts. It modulates. It sets bodies and nervous systems into motion, through patterned fluctuations of tension and release, deviation and return. These patterns aren’t symbolic. They are felt, lived, and shared.
And in being shared, they become profoundly social.
In this final post, we ask: why does this matter? What do we gain—philosophically, politically, existentially—by understanding music as a simulated value terrain? What does it help us to see?
Music Rehearses Aliveness
At its core, music is a practice of restoration. It lets us experience threat without danger, deviation without breakdown, sadness without despair. It constructs a terrain where we can traverse the forms of suffering and survival—and arrive, again and again, at return.
This is not a trivial pleasure. It is a form of affective resilience.
By staging value fluctuations in a space of safety, music lets us train the rhythms of homeostatic life:
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how to endure imbalance,
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how to ride the wave of rising pressure,
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how to hold our breath in the not-yet,
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and how to feel, with others, the joy of resolution.
It reminds us: you can go through this. You can come back. You are still here.
Music Aligns Bodies Without Words
In a world saturated with symbolic communication—where words often fail, falter, or fracture—music offers another mode of relation: alignment without interpretation.
It gives groups a shared temporal structure in which to feel. It synchronises nervous systems across bodies. It generates affective collectivity—not through meaning, but through movement, timing, co-regulation.
This is what makes it so central to ritual, to resistance, to grief, to celebration. When language breaks down, music steps in—not to explain, but to hold.
And in that holding, it sustains something deeply human: the experience of being alive, together.
Music Is Not a Mystery. It’s a System.
Perhaps the greatest insight of this model is that music’s power is not mystical. It is not ineffable. It is not a divine accident. It is a structural consequence of how life regulates itself through value.
Music mimics that regulation. It triggers the same systems. It operates at the level where bodies feel their way back to balance. And in doing so, it reminds us: you are not just a meaning-maker. You are a value-navigator. A lifeform. A rhythm in motion.
To make music, or to be moved by it, is to rehearse being alive. Not to represent it. To be it.
Coda: Music, Not Meaning
We don’t need to decode music. We need to feel it happen.
That happening is a dance through a value terrain—a traversal of affective shape and intensity, governed not by signs but by homeostatic logic. We follow the pull of resolution, the surge of dissonance, the settling of return—not because they mean something, but because they are something: states of the body, of the system, of the self in relation.
And this, perhaps, is the deepest lesson music teaches—not through telling, but through doing:
Life is not given in meaning.It is given in motion.And music is that motion, shaped in time, held in form, felt as value.