David Huron - A Theory of the Musically Sublime

Prof. David Huron has made a career of studying our reactions to music. In his latest work he describes the musical features that drive strong fear responses, and why this is pleasureable.


ABSTRACT:

Most music listening is enjoyable. However, on occasion, the experience of listening to music evokes especially strong emotions evident in music-induced tears, feeling choked-up, chills, awe, laughter, or ASMR. The eighteenth-century British philosopher, Edmund Burke, suggested that "sublime" emotions arise when pleasure is tinged with fear. For example, Burke suggested that the sense of awe evoked by gazing into a deep canyon depends on a muted sense of terror mixed with a feeling of delight. Ethological research on fear has identified four classic fear-related behaviors: fight, flight, freeze, and (in social animals) appeasement. Expanding on an argument made in "Sweet Anticipation" (2006), I describe how each of these "sublime" experiences can be attributed to cognitive inhibition of subcortical fear responses. I note that musical passages that evoke such responses can be traced to seven acoustical features evocative of fear or stress, and that contrastive affect renders these experiences highly pleasurable.

BIO

David Huron is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the School of Music & Center for Cognitive and Brain Sciences at the Ohio State University. David has received a number of awards including lifetime achievement awards from the Society for Music Perception and Cognition and the Society for Music Theory. In 2021 he was awarded the Nico Frijda Honorary Chair in Cognitive Science from the Amsterdam Brain and Cognition Center. Previous recipients have included James McCelland and Michael Tomasello. Having retired in 2019, David now lives with his partner, Kristin Precoda, in Benicia, California.