Cardiac and Respiratory Interoception in Affective Music Listening
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Instances of musical affect—or subjective feelings caused by music—have been linked to structured changes in peripheral physiology. However, it is unclear the degree to which musical affect arises from the brain’s monitoring and prediction of these internal changes during music listening. Musical chills have been used to study the interaction between physiology and subjective affect in music, and thus serve as an exemplar for investigating this question. Musical chills are peak moments of pleasure accompanied by certain bodily sensations i.e., tingling on the skin or a shiver down the spine, as well as distinct physiological patterns. While previous work links externally-oriented musical predictions to this subjective experience, it is unclear to what extent interoception, i.e., the brain’s monitoring and modeling of internal signals from within the body, plays a role in musical affect as well. To address this gap, this project assesses the link between musical affect and cardiac and respiratory interoception—the most widely studied dimensions of interoception in humans. We use simultaneous EEG, respiration, and electrocardiogram to estimate measures of cardiac and respiratory interoception, namely the heartbeat evoked potential (HEP) and respiratory modulation of neural activity. We manipulate the intensity of musical affect through listening to self-selected chill-inducing versus neutral music. If interoception plays a role in the experience of musical affect, we expect to see different effects of chill-inducing versus neutral music on heartbeat evoked potentials and respiratory modulation of neural activity.
Authors: Asthagiri, Arun, Loui, Psyche
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7165740598