Primary text analyses of recorded musical experiences of awe and the sublime

Background

Awe is a powerful emotion located in ‘the upper reaches of pleasure and on the boundaries of fear’ (Keltner & Haidt, 2003, p. 297), and its rarity renders it difficult to study due to the lack of experiential participant information. By investigating this complex aesthetic emotion through large-scale database research, this study shows that research extracted from historical databases can inform and facilitate contemporary participant-based research on music and emotions.

Aim

Theoretical frameworks have posited that awe is a reaction to the sublime (Konečni, 2005) and is an aesthetic emotion produced from an encounter with something vast (Keltner & Haidt, 2003). The multivalence aspect of musical awe has not been studied in detail, but a large majority of experiences of awe from other domains are reported to be positively valenced (Gorden et al., 2017). The aim of this research is to explore historical accounts related to musical awe to establish commonalities between these primary experiences and use those commonalities to examine and comment on contemporary research and theoretical frameworks.

Method

Historical primary sources of musical experiences can provide direct attestation of ideas of how one feels when experiencing musical awe. A number of these sources can be found in the Listening Experience Database (LED), an open source research database that hosts thousands of accounts of individual’s recorded experiences of listening to music. Since the concept of the sublime is strongly related to the experience of awe, the LED was searched for instances of the keywords ‘awe’ (29) and ‘sublime’ (55), with a total of 84 accounts containing either one or both of these keywords. These accounts were analysed using The Natural Language Toolkit, a platform for applying natural language processing (NLP) techniques to written text, which gathered word frequencies across all collected accounts.

Results

The results show the emotional terms with high frequency were often associated with ideas of size and power; this finding supports current theories on the occurrence of awe. Cross-referencing the word frequencies between keyword categories resulted in high intersection rates of emotionally-relevant terms. Between the two accounts the following terms of interest were produced: ‘great’, ‘good’, ‘grand’, and ‘solemn’. These findings help establish the terms ‘awe’ and ‘sublime’ to be semantically related by common descriptions of experiences and support theoretical ideas about multivalence appraisals of awe.

Discussion

The results of this study lend credence to several theories about the production and occurrence of awe—the importance of perception of vastness and the multivalenced nature of the emotion. These theories are supported by contemporary participant-based research (Peck, 2017), and with the addition of historical accounts of awe, these theories become more credible. By investigating emotions like awe through large-scale databases, this study shows that historical-based research on music and emotions can facilitate contemporary participant-based research through the production of additional data for analysis, and that this research provides an important historical context for how emotional language has been used.

References

Keltner J. and Haidt, J. (2003). Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion. Cognition and Emotion, 17(2), 297-314. doi:10.1080/02699930244000318

Konečni, V. J. (2005). The aesthetic trinity: Awe, being moved, thrills. Bulletin of Psychology and the Arts, 5(2), 27-44.

Peck, L. S. L. (2017). Experiences and Appraisals of Musical Awe. Poster session presented at the 10th International Conference of Students of Systematic Musicology, London, United Kingdom.