Event Details - David Huron Lecture

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).