Tuesday, September 26, 2017
5:00 PM - 6:30 PM (ET)
Palamountain Hall Davis Auditorium
Event Type
Lecture
Contact
Department
Music
Link
http://ems.skidmore.edu/MasterCalendar/EventDetails.aspx?EventDetailId=17503
The Science of the Sublime: How Music Takes Your
Breath Away
Most music listening
is enjoyable. However, on occasion, the experience of listening to music evokes
transcendent feelings: the music may give you goosebumps, bring tears to your eyes,
make you feel "choked up," or "take your breath away."
These experiences are so familiar that we don't recognize their peculiarity.
Instead of giving us goosebumps, why doesn't music make us blush? Rather than
bringing tears to our eyes, why doesn't music make us drool instead? This
presentation reviews pertinent physiological, neurological, behavioral, and
musical research, and offers a theory that explains why we experience
goosebumps, tears, constricted pharynx, and breath-holding in response to music.
It also explains why these unusual responses can be so pleasurable.
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 Visiting Lecturer at the
University of California, Berkeley, the Donald Wort Lecturer at Cambridge
University, and the Astor Lecturer at Oxford. With over 150 scholarly
publications, Huron's research have received a number of awards, including the
Society for Music Perception and Cognition's Lifetime Achievement Award. His
2006 book "Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of
Expectation" received the Wallace Berry Award from the Society for Music
Theory. His most recent book is "Voice Leading: The Science behind a
Musical Art" (MIT Press, 2016).