Awe

When I receive the score of a piece to play, I see my part, one of many dozens of parts that make up the piece of music. I have the sense that I am connected to the past of our species, of our history of making music that is tens of thousands of years old. And to our present and future. It’s so humbling. When we perform we put something out there in the space . . . some pattern of notes of our instruments. . . . I think all the notes that have ever been played in the hall are still there. I mean, if the roof was taken off of the symphony hall, where would the notes go? When I play, I feel the vibration in my heart. Those patterns go out into space. They envelop people. Surround them in texture. It is beyond language. Beyond thought. Beyond religion. It is like a cashmere blanket of sound.

We find awe in playing music with others, as part of a history of music making that is tens of thousands of years old. The awe that music moves us to does seem beyond speech, a new kind of thought, and, for many, more powerful than religion (and for many who are religious, a pathway to the Divine). But what are we to make of Yumi’s metaphor that the notes she plays surround listeners in a “cashmere blanket of sound”?

When Yumi moves her bow across her cello’s strings, or when Beyoncé’s vocal cords vibrate as air moves through them, or when Gambian griot superstar Sona Jobarteh plucks the strings of her kora, those collisions move air particles, producing sound waves—vibrations—that move out into space. Those sound waves hit your eardrums, whose rhythmic vibrations move hairs on the cochlear membrane just on the other side of the eardrum, triggering neurochemical signals beginning in the auditory cortex on the side of your brain.

Sound waves are transformed into a pattern of neurochemical activation that moves from the auditory cortex to the anterior insular cortex, which directly influences and receives input from your heart, lungs, vagus nerve, sexual organs, and gut. It is in this moment of musical-meaning making in the brain that we do indeed listen to music with our bodies, and where musical feeling begins.

This neural representation of music, now synced up with essential rhythms of the body, moves through a region of the brain known as the hippocampus, which adds layers of memories to the ever-accreting meaning of the sounds. Music so readily transports us from the present to the past, or from what is actual to what is possible, spatiotemporal journeys that can be awe-inspiring.

And finally, this symphony of neurochemical signals makes its way to our prefrontal cortex, where, via language, we endow this web of sound with personal and cultural meaning. Music allows us to understand the great themes of social living, our identities, the fabric of our communities, and often how our worlds should change.

Recent studies reveal how music shifts our bodies to the neurophysiology of awe. Melodious, slow music reduces our heart rate, a sign of vagus nerve activation, and lowers our blood pressure. Faster, louder music—in one study, music by the Swedish pop group ABBA—increases our blood pressure and heart rate, but lowers levels of cortisol. Even more energetic, edgy music, then, will arouse us, but without the sense of peril that accompanies elevated levels of cortisol. When we listen to music that moves us, the dopaminergic circuitry of the brain is activated, which opens the mind to wonder and exploration. In this bodily state of musical awe, we often tear up and get the chills, those embodied signs of merging with others to face mysteries and the unknown.

In our history, music has most often been enjoyed with others, and when people listen to the same music together, their brains synchronize in regions involved in ascribing emotional meaning to the music (the amygdala), delight (caudate nucleus), and language and cultural meaning (prefrontal cortex). In one imaginative study in this vein, participants, all wearing brain-recording caps, listened to a live band together in a club rented out for the study. As they did, their brains synced up in the delta band, a brain wave frequency associated with bodily movement, inclining us toward moving in unison. Importantly, the degree of this shared brain activation predicted how much the individual was moved by the music and felt close to other people listening. Music breaks down the boundaries between self and other and can unite us in feelings of awe.