Article

Musical Piloerection

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Abstract

Piloerection (from the Latin pilus for hair) is a skin response which can be observed at many occasions among various species as a reaction to fear, aggression, or coldness. It is also a human response to music and in these cases a highly pleasurable one. Not everyone experiences it, and it is particularly difficult to evoke the reaction in experimental settings. We accidentally happened to catch a spontaneous distinct reaction with finger temperature, skin conductance, heart rate, and respiration. This allows us to study how these emotion correlates online with the music—the dynamics of the event. From this and recent articles, we discuss suggestions of how music causes piloerection.

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... We do not often think of the mechanisms behind the physical coupling between external and internal processes. How a strong, sudden, and unexpected experience of musical improvisation "got under the skin" has been illustrated by Vickhoff et al. [33]. In order to record physiological reactions while listening to a pianist´s improvised playing, the listener was subjected to the continuous recording of their heart rate, skin conductance (sweating) and skin temperature. ...
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