Empirical and modelling approaches to the psychology of musical awe

The experience of awe is one that we may all recognise, the feeling of being overwhelmed by a great force and often inspired from its presence. Research from various disciplines has recently taken an interest in understanding and explaining this phenomenon through psychological models guided by the extensive philosophical discourse on the sublime. This research project, through its seven studies, takes some of the first steps to validate and test these psychological models through participant-based experiences of awe evoked from music, known as ‘musical awe’. Studies 1 and 2 examined first-hand accounts of musical awe, and found commonalities in experiences, associated judgements, and emotional sentiments through a mixed methods approach. Studies 3, 4, and 5 used the Musical Awe Corpus (MAC)—a collection of music excerpts from experiences of musical awe in Study 1—to examine shared musical associations and categorical groupings through online psychometric scale experiments. Study 6 investigated the relationship between judgements of size and associations of musical awe through a time-series, virtual object manipulation task. Lastly, Study 7 used music information retrieval techniques to extract and analyse musical features from the MAC to assess which features are prevalent and important to awe-associate music. Taken together, the findings of these studies advance a general characterisation of musical awe as an emotional phenomenon best understood as shared between two valenced-differentiated groups. The more common group is associated with positive valence and emotions of joy and wonder, whilst the other group is associated with threat and fear. However, both groups of musical awe show strong associations with size and power. Sonically, awe-related music, especially the negative valenced group, can be characterised by high levels of brightness, roughness, and extensive changes in spectral qualities. In conclusion, these studies largely support much of the theoretical grounding concerning the production and occurrence of awe, and from these findings, a novel empirically driven model was created to expand and improve our understanding of musical awe