Do You Chill When I Chill? A Cross-Cultural Study of Strong Emotional Responses to Music

While listeners can infer the mood expressed by the music of a different culture, the question of whether strong felt emotional responses can also be induced cross-culturally remains unanswered. We address this question by measuring chill responses, sudden increases in emotional arousal, through self-report and skin conductance measures. Excerpts of Western classical, traditional Chinese, and Hindustani classical music were presented to 3 groups of participants, each familiar with one of these styles. Participants felt a similar number of chills to both familiar and unfamiliar musical styles, but significantly fewer chills to scrambled music, which acted as a control. Acoustic analyses revealed that sudden peaks in loudness, brightness, and roughness were correlated with chills across styles, suggesting that similar acoustic elements induced emotional responses cross-culturally. The number of chills was also related to the degree to which participants paid attention to the music, rated the music as emotional and as having affected their own mood, but not to how much participants liked the music. Overall, this research counters the idea of musical emotional meaning as being entirely generated within cultural conventions and supports the claim that some aspects of the way music conveys emotion may be shared across cultures.