Listening To Music As A Re-Creative Process: Physiological, Psychological, And Psychoacoustical Correlates Of Chills And Strong Emotions

Abstract

FEELINGS IN RESPONSE TO music are often accompanied by measurable bodily reactions such as goose bumps or shivers down the spine, commonly called "chills." In order to investigate distinct acoustical and musical structural elements related to chill reactions, reported chill reactions and bodily reactions were measured continuously. Chill reactions did not show a simple stimulus-response pattern or depend on personality traits, such as low sensation seeking and high reward dependence. Musical preferences and listening situations also played a role in chill reactions. Participants seemed to react to musical patterns, not to mere acoustical triggers. The entry of a voice and changes in volume were shown to be the most reactive patterns. These results were also confirmed by a retest experiment.

Personality correlates of reporting Chinese words from the Deutsch “high-low” word illusion by Chinese-speaking people

“…Our findings are also in line with the report that positive music makes people more likely use happy words in their continuations while negative music makes them more likely to use sad words [44] . In our participants, the number of reported meaningful Chinese words was positively correlated with ZKPQ impulsive sensationseeking, aggression-hostility and activity traits, which supports the idea that personality traits influence the perception of music [22][23][24][25][26] .…”

“…In addition, overly positive self-perception appears to be a kind of illusion, which implies that personality trait is correlated with illusion perception [18,21] . Personality traits are also involved in the emotional response to or preference for music [22][23][24][25][26][27] :…”

Predictive information processing in music cognition. A critical review

“…Sloboda et al, 2001;Grewe et al, 2007) reveals indirectly that cognitively based non-symbolic expectations of, at least, continuity of the auditory scene or continuity of these features were at work, that accord with theories of ecological listening and involve the appropriation of other cognitive auditory mechanisms (Clarke, 2005). It is difficult, however, to conceptualise such forms of ongoing predictive soundscape integration under the same umbrella term as structural, feature-based prediction (because it is unclear which predictions except for continuity are formed).…”

The Right Sensory Mix

“…Differences between individuals were important: 17 did not show any piloerection, and among the 21 responsive ones, some had up to 15 piloerections per song! Both sudden increase in volume-subito forte-and unexpected modulation in frequency might provoke a piloerection (Grewe et al 2007).…”