ABSTRACT
The neuroscience of frisson does, however, point to one provocative link between the musical sublime and personal salience: neurochemical addiction. This chapter discusses expectation-violation in music which can be analyzed as an instance of adjusting an internal tonal schema to accommodate a kind of vastness. Music, however, poses a challenge to the requirement of real schematic accommodation in aesthetic awe. The coalescing research around awe and frisson paints a picture of the sublime whose most profound kinship is not to fear, transcendence, or alienation, but rather to the simpler practical delight of learning—presenting an exciting potential new direction for empirically curious theorists of the sublime. Theories of the sublime as an emotional transformation of fear into pleasure originate with Edmund Burke, who hypothesized that the intensity of the sublime stemmed from its origins in the strong passions of self-preservation. The idea that negative affect might be converted to positive resurfaced in twentieth-century arousal-based models of emotion.
