A Geometry Nodes based "particle system", constrained to a custom mesh surface. Additional control for distance from the surface and the style of the noise flow. 

Video demo here and here.

In this additional version of the "Surface flow" setup, we add a bonus degree of movement - away from the mesh, along its normals. This way a fuzzy, warm and chaotic movement is created, which surrounds your mesh with floating and buzzing particles - while keeping them above the surface all times.

In this example the rotation speed is driven by audio. It, of course, could be driven by any value or manual keyframes too.

You can, of course, replace the main object and the particle objects with anything you wish to visualize.

The surface swirl effect is driven by a regular Noise texture, or - if you wish - you can use the provided Curl noise node group, which uses a "leapfrog integration" method to calculate the Curl and Gradient of the noise field, and creating nice, pleasing patterns.

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NOTE

-(Since it is a concept demonstration, it is kept as simple as possible.) The GeoNodes trees are kept clean for easier readability and have detailed explanations. Everything is built from the base. The point of these setups is to provide a base core of the concept, node from node, instead of contracting all into node groups with exposed settings, which makes everything harder to read and dissect.

You can embellish, refine as you wish based on the core or realize your own ideas.

-Read the text description, it has a lot of useful info !

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Recommended blends -

The Wire

Kinetica

The Surface Voronizer