ABSTRACT: Most music listening is enjoyable. However, on occasion, the experience of listening to music evokes transcendent feelings: the music may give you goose bumps, bring a tear to your eyes, take your breath away, make you feel "choked up," or even cause you to laugh with pleasure. This presentation reviews pertinent physiological, neurological, behavioral, and music-analytic research, and offer an account that explains why these unusual responses can be so enjoyable. Curiously, the research supports an idea of sublime emotions first proposed by the eighteenth century Irish philosopher, Edmund Burke.
BIO: David Huron is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor at the Ohio State University, where he holds joint appointments in the School of Music and in the Center for Cognitive and Brain Sciences. Among other distinctions, Dr. Huron has been the Ernest Bloch Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, the Donald Wort Lecturer at Cambridge University, and the Astor Lecturer at Oxford. With some 170 scholarly publications, Huron's work has received a number of awards, including the Wallace Berry Award from the Society for Music Theory, and a lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Music Perception and Cognition.