Evidence of neural entrainment highlights the significant role of environmental features (Djebbara et al., 2022; Charalambous and Djebbara, 2023) in shaping these complex interactions. For example, research on neural entrainment has demonstrated phase-locked synchronization of neural oscillations in the visual cortex at an alpha frequency to the rhythmic frequency of an external flickering light. This synchronization often results in periodic fluctuations in visual perception, causing moments where vision appears sharper (Mathewson et al., 2012; Spaak et al., 2014). Attention may also rhythmically modulate perception, producing cycles of heightened and reduced perceptual sensitivity (Papadopoulos et al., 2012; VanRullen, 2016; VanRullen, 2018). Sensing the world is, thus, an active process that leverages temporal regularities to anticipate future events across sensory modalities. A clear example of this cross-modal temporal anticipation is speech perception. During conversation, the visual input of a speaker’s lip movements provides crucial temporal cues for upcoming auditory inputs (Schroeder et al., 2008), facilitating speech comprehension. Interestingly, entrainment can occur in response to quasi-rhythmic patterns characterized by a successive build-up and release of tension, where each release prepares for the subsequent escalation.

These mechanisms indicate how perception is an active, temporally structured process that adapts to environmental rhythms. They highlight two central processes associated with theories of direct perception: active sensing (e.g., sniffing, eye movement, and saccades or micro saccades) and dynamic attending (Large and Jones, 1999; Lakatos et al., 2019). These processes involve actively detecting and then enhancing the sensing of behaviorally relevant environmental information (while suppressing irrelevant aspects), as well as preparing the system for forthcoming input flows through the generation of rhythmic expectations (Schroeder et al., 2010; VanRullen, 2016). The idea of active sensing is fundamental to the concept of direct perception and the notion of resonance in ecological psychology. Gibson notes that “ [t]he state of a perceptual system is altered when it is attuned to information of a certain sort. The system has become sensitized. Differences are noticed that were previously not noticed. Features become distinctive that were formerly vague” (Gibson, 1979, p. 249). Active detection of behaviorally relevant environmental information is facilitated by dynamic periodicities in visuospatial attention ³ , which are shaped both by extrinsic structural properties and by intrinsic factors such as intention, motivation, and affect (Gaillard and Ben Hamed, 2022).

Embodied engagement with architectural and spatial rhythms, perceived dynamically through movement, can scaffold experiences of attunement between an agent and their surroundings, reinforcing the view that perception is an active, temporally structured process. The inherent temporal regularities in the environment help predict and anticipate upcoming sensory events, thus optimizing behavioral performance (Cravo et al., 2013; Spaak et al., 2014). Moreover, the perception of such structures is not only modulated by movement but can also reciprocally constrain movement, as demonstrated in cases of sensorimotor coupling (Djebbara et al., 2019; Djebbara et al., 2021). This suggests the possibility of natural attunement (see Charalambous and Djebbara, 2023) with continuous environmental stimulation, such as, for example, the rate of change of visual features in the optic flow. For instance, Leonards et al. (2015) demonstrated that the directional pattern of the floor tiles can subtly alter walking trajectories, causing individuals to veer from a straight path. Similarly, Ludwig and colleagues (2018) found that the perceived rate of change of vertical stripe patterns influenced walking speed: when the space between stripes was reduced–creating the visual impression of rapid motion–participants walked more slowly. A real-world application of this phenomenon can be seen in traffic safety interventions. Thaler and Sunstein (2021) reported that decreasing the spacing between white road stripes along Lake Michigan’s east coast led to a reduction in driving speed, demonstrating how environmental rhythms and affordances can be intentionally designed to guide behavior.

These behavioral effects suggests that environmental (built) structures may engender a sense of attunement through movement and spatial interaction. For example, the behavior setting and atmosphere of a museum, as illustrated in Figure 1, can be conceptualized as a ‘bundle of different rhythms’, of fluctuations of environmental information, modulating coupling processes between body-brain rhythms and the sociomaterial environment. Perceptual systems—comprising the sensory organs, the motor system, the nervous system, and their coordinated activity—can couple with the perceptual information contained in environmental energy flows, such as light or vibrating air. Such information specifies the available affordances, and the agent’s responsiveness to the relevant affordances is closely linked to the behavior level of analysis (Raja and de Wit, 2023).

Phenomenological perspectives ⁴ informed by ecological psychology and enactivism suggest that the detection of relevant affordances gives rise to an embodied readiness for action—a pre-reflective phenomenon felt corporeally, which links the phenomenological to the behavioral scale of analysis (Bruineberg and Rietveld, 2014; Rietveld and Kiverstein, 2014; Rietveld et al., 2018). As Rietveld, Denys and Van Westen claim, “the experienced invitation of an affordance […] can be measured (and analyzed) as a state of ‘action readiness’ in emotion psychology and (affective) neuroscience” (2018, p. 3). These states of action readiness “originate in fluctuations of affect” that orient individuals towards affordances that matter to them (Kiverstein et al., 2019, p. 2859).

Behavior settings such as museums, restaurants or contemplative places exhibit stability over longer periods, forming patterns of action readiness associated with the slower dynamics of sociomaterial practices. These patterns of action readiness “can enslave or entrain faster affordance-related states of action readiness” (Rietveld et al., 2018, p. 22), thereby pre-structuring which states of readiness are likely to be adopted. To accommodate what the individual cares about in the particular situation—shaped by personal dispositions and the atmosphere of the setting—multiple affordance-related states of readiness interact and self-organize to generate coordinated engagement with the world (Frijda et al., 2014; Rietveld et al., 2018). For example, the behavior setting of a contemplative place may invite general patterns of readiness for quiet, slow actions (e.g., speaking softly), but distinct affective dispositions differentiate responses and the experience of attunement with the atmosphere of the place: tourists are more likely to explore and observe the architecture and ornamentation of a temple, while devotees may remain seated in quiet contemplation and prayer. As Rietveld Denys VanWesten remark: “[s]tates of action readiness characterize affective states in ways that reflect the strivings of organisms to modify its relation to the environment […] Relevant affordances move us, affect and solicit us as they get us ready to act […] Affective tension and action readiness are two sides of the same coin” (2018, p. 14)

Various situated perspectives of affectivity emphasize a primordial affective registering of relations (Colombetti, 2014; 2017), understood as a concrete, direct perceptual grasp similar to affordances. For example, affective arrangements can be seen as “prepared occasions for affective engagement, for absorption and attunement” (Slaby, 2019, p. 275). Similarly, atmospheres have been described as “ecological invites or meanings” (Griffero, 2014b, p. 46), environment-agent joint potentialities (Velasco and Niikawa, 2025) and fields of potential where specific actions “bubble up”, becoming more salient, conditioned, or induced (Massumi, 2021a). Atmospheres, thus, modulate “the whole landscape of affordances and the felt body that resonates with it, settling the background from where concrete and relevant affordances may emerge” (García, 2024, p. 17).

This relational and process-oriented dimension of affectivity is also highlighted in Massumi’s (2021a) approach to atmospheres. He describes them as collections of events, “[m]ovements of particles, bodies, and rays, billows of winds and shifts and shafts of light, reflections and sounds, echoes and contrasts, overshadowing, all coming together in a singular feeling”. Notably, he notes that this is not merely a simple aggregate but “a coming-together in reciprocal activity” (Massumi, 2021a, p. 204). A closer look at resonance, through the example of an echo, reveals the two-way movement inherent in atmospheric feeling. As Massumi (2021b) explains, “[resonation] fills the emptiness with its complex patterning … The bouncing back and forth multiplies the sound’s movement without cutting it …This complex self-continuity is a putting into relation of the movement to itself: self-relation”. He argues that the best term for this “complicating immediacy of self-relation is [Massumi (2021b) pp. 13–14]. These intensities generate a particular affect within the individual, where the atmospheric feeling of the affective tone coincides with the transmission of a dynamic form, a pattern of activity (Massumi, 2021b, pp. 194–196).

Taken together, these accounts of atmospheres, resonance, and intensity foreground affectivity as a dynamic, processual phenomenon rather than a static property of environments or individuals. The conceptualization of atmospheres as a collection of events that come together in reciprocal activity and as a field of joint potentialities between the individual and the environment serves as a stepping stone towards understanding affect as a process. Extending current critiques that challenge traditional static view of architectural experience (Robinson, 2021a), this perspective of affectivity draws attention to its temporal unfolding, opening pathways toward a more process-oriented understanding of the affective experience of architectural space.

The dynamic embodied experience of being affectively “gripped” by an atmosphere is, according to Slaby (2014), a form of “phenomenal coupling” with structures or processes in one’s environment that itself has dynamic phenomenal characteristics. This interaction between environmental dynamics and the active feeling body becomes manifest as “an arena of significant opportunities” for embodied engagement with the world. It is experience as “felt bodily potentialities” through which the environment is apprehended (Slaby, 2014). Interoceptive sensations shaped by prior experience and the visceral body rhythms of organs, muscles, and joints inform our ongoing engagement with the world. These bodily-affective changes are integrated with current exteroceptive multisensory information to improve the estimation of expected uncertainty through a future-oriented anticipatory mechanism (Gallagher and Allen, 2018).

The metaphor of the felt body as “a sounding board for spatially ‘poured out’ atmospheres” (Slaby, 2019, p. 278) suggests a process of bodily resonance between internal and external rhythms. According to Vara Sanchez, the idea of bodily resonance is often associated with the phenomenological notion of the feeling-body rather than the physical body, highlighting a relatively passive view of the body. Building on empirical evidence on how visceral shape brain dynamics and cognition (see Azzalini et al., 2019), Vara Sanchez argues that “role of the body in the embodiment of emotions, thus, is not only sending interoceptive information to the brain […] or bodily resonance; it plays, as well, an active part on the rhythm that enacts along brain oscillations (Vara Sánchez, 2019, p. 725). Rhythm, beyond mere repetition, can be conceptualized more broadly as flow or form (Benveniste, 1951, p. 287) ⁷ or as “an evolving pattern of oscillations able to entrain other oscillations” (Vara Sánchez, 2020, p. 88). Such enactivist and dynamic views of affectivity (Colombetti, 2014; Vara Sánchez, 2019) highlight the importance of focusing on the enacted rhythms and the rhythmic interactions between the body-brain-environment system.

There are different qualities of rhythm we can experience in the built environment, often linked to a tension between oppositions (Vara Sánchez, 2023). Various rhythmic phenomena–marked by alternations between difference/repetition, tension/release, expected/unexpected, and movement/stillness–shape the overall atmospheric rhythm to which individuals can become attuned. They create environmental structures with temporal regularities that perceptual systems can flexibly use, even across sensory modalities, to support attunement and the anticipation of upcoming events.

Actively engaging with the affective dynamics of environmental structures or processes that manifest expressive qualities (Slaby, 2014) —such as theatrical performance, music concerts, or affective atmospheres (e.g., a crowd of protestors chanting rhythmically)—can modulate bodily rhythms. Recent studies measuring physiological signals (cardiac and respiratory activity, skin conductance responses) in audiences at classical music concerts provide evidence of synchronization across individuals (Tschacher et al., 2023; Tschacher et al., 2024a). The findings suggest that synchronized embodied experiences were linked not only to personality traits but also to the emotional and aesthetic quality of the experience. Moreover, participants’ “listening mode” had a measurable impact on synchrony: listeners who reported being attuned to the auditory vibrations of music—including its structure, melodies, rhythms, and instrumental timbres—showed greater synchronization compared to those who reported being distracted or listening only “with half an ear” (Tschacher et al., 2024b). Haptic vibration can also increase the intensity of emotional experiences, heightening, for instance, the sensation of fear when watching a horror movie (Makioka et al., 2022).

In summary, these accounts highlight how bodily rhythms (which can modulate brain rhythms) interweave with environmental structures to generate dynamic fields of attunement. Evidence of collective synchronization in musical and performative contexts further illustrates how atmospheric rhythms extend beyond the individual, shaping shared affective experiences that unfold over time. Rhythms also play a key role in architecturally arranged situations, where they function as mediating structures that underpin sense-making and affectivity through agent-environment couplings. Architectural form itself can act as a patterning force that modulates rhythms (Robinson, 2021b, p. 1), shaping how affective experience unfolds. Current work on situated affectivity suggests that the notion of “affective arrangement” provides a valuable tool for examining this relationality, enabling researchers to trace how local constellations of elements dynamically interact and contribute over time to complex, orchestrated formations. This perspective highlights rhythm as a central aspect of situated affectivity, revealing how temporal regularities and oscillatory patterns organize embodied engagement with the world.

Conceptual vocabularies that capture changes over time such as rhythms, vibrations, and tonality can help explain how different local constellations of elements and energy patterns influence the overall affective atmosphere and the individual’s experience within it. Vibration and tone are two relevant phenomenological concepts capturing how we attune to environmental features (Ash and Gallacher, 2015). For example, the vibrations associated with urban tactile paving encourage visually impaired individuals to attune to auditory-haptic rhythms, guiding their movement through the city. Vibration, as defined by Ash and Gallacher (2015), is a “unit of sense crossing human and non-human boundaries” and can be approached both qualitatively (as felt experiences of intensity) and quantitatively (in terms of frequency, amplitude, phase, damping, and periodicity). Conversely, tone refers to how vibrations are organized with specific sensory effects in mind, shaping different tendencies and degrees of attunement.

Furthermore, the concept of vibration shifts the focus to environmental elements that function as thresholds, influencing an object’s or body’s capacity to act (Ash and Gallacher, 2015). A striking example is the Urban Carpet installation in Aarhus, which explores the relationship between affordances and atmosphere. This installation, as illustrated in Figure 2, is a woven textile of charred wood placed at a crossroad, which draws attention to the unexpected sensory experiences of touch and smell. Altering the texture and olfactory qualities of the space changes pedestrians’ walking pace, stimulating spontaneous actions such as foot tapping and dancing (Chebotareva and Rask, 2018). This installation has been discussed in relation to the effects of the perceived resistance and the associated haptic feeling (Robinson, 2021a) as well as in terms of its contribution to placemaking as a result of the experience of its sensual effects (Christiansen, 2020).

Moving towards a more process-oriented perspective we focus here on the shift of the multisensory experience and how it relates to the phenomenon of metastable attunement, a term from dynamic systems theory that captures the flexible balance between stability and openness to novelty in agent–environment coupling (Bruineberg et al., 2021). Metastable attunement refers to the ability to maintain a dynamic, responsive state that enable flexible switching between different modes of skillful engagement with the environment such as switching from exploiting already familiar action possibilities to experimenting with novel ones in response to situational demands (Bruineberg et al., 2021). By becoming attuned to environmental dynamics, the body-brain system helps anticipate and prioritize actions that will minimize uncertainty. From an ecological-enactive perspective, this active inference ⁸ is associated with the tendency towards an optimal grip on a particular situation, or more precisely, a tendency towards an optimal metastable attunement to the dynamics of the environment (Bruineberg and Rietveld, 2014; Bruineberg et al., 2018). This reflects a readiness to switch between behavioral patterns in response to environmental demands and the individual’s needs. The function of the Urban Carpet as a threshold illustrates well how metastable attunement enables context-sensitive, selective openness towards anticipating new forms of interaction with the environment, such as foot tapping and dancing. The subtle variations in vibration that arise when walking on the charred wood invite different states of action-readiness, which generate new action tendencies and facilitate a switch into new behavioural patterns.

In addition to the Urban Carpet example, the Reversible Destiny Lofts of Arakawa and Gins, as illustrated in Figure 3, offer a complementary architectural case potentially associated with metastable attunement. The design of these lofts is strongly linked to their concept of “architectural body” as a relational field (Gins and Arakawa, 2002) between the proper body of the organism and environment—constantly being recalibrated through sensory engagement. In particular, by introducing shifts in the sensory experience though chromatic contrast, textures, uneven floors and slopes they destabilize habitual ways of engaging with a domestic environment, compelling inhabitants to actively re-attune and change their behavioral patterns and actions. As argued by Bruineberg et al. (2021) this sensitivity to novel situations and the sensitivity to a multiplicity of action possibilities is linked to the property of metastable attunement.

Anticipating an affordance within a specific context generates an action-readiness pattern. As Bruineberg and Rietveld (2014) note, this makes the affordance stand out as relevant. The relevance of locally available affordances is felt corporeally in the skilled body as states of affordance-related action readiness that are simultaneously affective and behavioral (Kiverstein et al., 2019). Considering the different dynamics and relational structures that emerge between the brain, body and the architecturally arranged surroundings offers a promising approach that can advance design practice. Conceptual vocabularies, such as rhythms and vibrations, “capture” the energy patterns in the built environment including fluctuations in sound, light, and temperature that vary over time or in response to movement and play a key role in rethinking the temporal dimension of architectural experience.

The agent’s selective openness to the available affordances depends on dynamical patterns that unfold across multiple timescales. Slower-evolving dynamics, such as sociocultural practices, constrain the faster-evolving dynamics that shape the process of attunement to the current context (Bruineberg and Rietveld, 2014; Velasco, 2025). Consequently, abilities acquired through a history of engagement in sociocultural practices (Rietveld, 2008) shape how an individual perceives, responds to, and attunes to the actions that a particular situation affords. Differences in prior experience, bodily skills, personal tendencies, affective dispositions and broader social, cultural and gender dynamics influence responsiveness to higher-order networks of affordances while atmospheres (similar to behavior settings) “shape the potentiality of what is to be felt, perceived or acted on” (García, 2024, p. 18). These differences may cause specific individuals to feel disoriented or excluded in particular environments. Krueger (2021) argues that an inability to tune into the affective arrangement of a setting may create a form of affective dissonance at a pre-reflective level, similar to the discomfort caused by spatial disorientation (Charalambous, 2019; Charalambous et al., 2021). This suggests that some atmospheres, for example, might be more inclusive than others in promoting social interconnectedness and shared experiences. For example, a neurodivergent individual may experience difficulties tuning-in and orienting in environments that are noisy or brightly lit. In contrast, adjustable lighting or variability in lighting conditions in public spaces may reduce the possibility of sensory overload and emotional distress. Designing for (neuro)diversity requires recognizing how specific settings may not be adequately configured to accommodate different styles of “bodily being-in-the-world”, thereby limiting possibilities for social connection, attunement and the feeling of “being at home” (Krueger, 2021, p. 127).

The feeling of “being at home” is scaffolded synchronically by the immediate material and sensory context one engages with and diachronically by the social, cultural, and material practices that shape one’s lived experiences. Through these practices, individuals develop confidence in their relationship with the environment and an “affective trust” in the reliability of specific environmental resources serving as affective scaffolding (Krueger and Colombetti, 2018). This trust contributes to a more general attitude of certainty or “basic trust” in the surrounding world, supporting unreflective, habitual actions (Habets et al., 2024).

However, when this fundamental trust is disrupted (due to persistent stress, cultural displacement or psychopathological conditions), it can result in a diminished sense of bodily resonance with the world, ultimately restricting access to affective regulation (Krueger and Colombetti, 2018; Habets et al., 2024). Given this, it is crucial to conceptualize urban environments as constellations of affective niches, of public places (e.g., streets, canals, rivers, seaside areas, squares, parks, and contemplative places) as healing hubs offering affective affordances that support emotional regulation and well-being.