Awe

Yumi’s account of musical awe aligns with this thinking. For Yumi, 32nd notes are “angry” and “aggressive.” Fortissimo accents express grief. Sounds “punch,” tears “stream,” anger “surges,” like metaphorical descriptions in poems. She hurtles backward in time and is transported to a space where she is together with her deceased grandparents. Yumi’s experience of awe in playing Mozart’s Requiem allowed her to understand life’s most reliable pattern—that it ends, even for those we love most, in death.

How does music relate life patterns to us? How does it allow our minds to grapple, in the case of awe, with how we relate to the vast mysteries of life? The easy answer is through lyrics. And indeed, in our twenty-six-culture study, people around the world wrote about how specific lyrics transformed their minds. You probably could quote right now lyrics from songs that brought you awe and an understanding of life patterns.

The more complex possibility is that the sounds of music, independent of the words that make up the lyrics, stir specific emotions. It has taken Swiss emotion scientist Klaus Scherer forty years to figure out how.

Scherer’s theorizing goes as follows. When we are in an emotional state, like anger, compassion, terror, or awe, our neurophysiology changes: our breathing, heart rate, blood pressure, vagus nerve activation, and movements of muscles throughout the body all shift to support adaptive behaviors like fleeing, recoiling, soothing, embracing, exulting, or exploring. These bodily changes alter the mechanics of the vocal apparatus and, by implication, the acoustics of our voice. For example, when in an anxious state, the muscles around the lungs are tense, our tightened vocal cords produce less variability in pitch, and with less saliva in our mouths our lips tighten, resulting in high-pitched, unvarying, up-tempo sounds that convey anxiety.

Musicians express emotions, Scherer continues, by producing sounds that resemble the acoustics of our vocal expression of emotion. In empirical tests of this idea, musicians are asked to use their voices, or an instrument, or even just a drum, to communicate different emotions. They do so, research finds, by producing music whose sounds resemble emotion-specific profiles of pitch, rhythm, contour, loudness, and timbre. Anger, for example, is conveyed in slow sounds with lower pitches and rising contours, like a roar of protest. The musical expression of joy is done with higher-pitched, quickly shifting sounds with rising contours, like the sounds of good friends tittering or a stream flowing during spring. When these samples of music are played to ordinary listeners, we have no trouble discerning ten different emotions, even from the beat of a drum.

To document how music expresses awe, Alan Cowen and I had participants from China and the United States first provide minute-long nonlyrical music samples that they personally felt expressed various emotions, including awe. We also had Chinese participants do the same with traditional Chinese music, which our U.S. participants had never heard. When we played these brief musical selections to new participants in the two countries, these new listeners could reliably detect thirteen emotions in the musical selections, including those provided by people from the other culture, and including our U.S. participants when listening to selections of traditional Chinese music. The feelings we perceive in music include the following: amusing, energizing, calm, erotic, triumphant, angry or defiant, fearful, tense, annoying, dreamy, sad, serene, and awe-inspiring. Aligning with Scherer’s theorizing, the music that expressed awe had acoustics resembling the whoa

s and wows and aahs we vocalize when feeling awe.

Recent neuroscience suggests that when we hear music, we perceive more than just a category of emotion, our focus thus far. We imagine emotion-specific actions, inferring from the musicians’ sounds their bodily state and likely action. Those images of action trigger our mimetic tendencies, leading us to initiate similar movements in our bodies. Embodied images and memories from our lives, in turn, arise in our minds. What this suggests is that when we hear music that expresses awe, our own bodies and minds shift, even ever so slightly, to the wonder and saintly tendencies of awe.