Bass amplification impacts emotional, neural and physiological responses to music

Live music is highly appreciated for its emotional impact, often enhanced by louder sound levels to boost audience arousal and engagement. As high sound levels cause hearing damage and disturb nearby residents, focusing on audio quality offers a safer way to enhance emotional responses to music. However, how quality parameters, such as the balance between low and high frequencies, impact and link emotional, neural and physiological responses is unclear. This study examines how low-frequency amplification affects listeners' arousal and its connection to neural and physiological responses during music listening. Two experiments were conducted: (i) in controlled laboratory conditions and (ii) in more ecological, live settings. Subjective reports indicate that amplified bass significantly increases arousal, with a lesser but noticeable effect on valence. Electroencephalography (EEG) recordings show that early auditory components are unaffected by bass amplification, but the arousing effect is linked to enhanced oscillatory features in the low delta (2-5 Hz) frequency range, suggesting active, predictive tracking of music. In natural music-listening settings, portable electrodermal activity (EDA) sensors were used to measure emotional and physiological responses. Results confirm that bass amplification increases arousal and that EDA better captures emotional integration in response to bass amplification than EEG. This suggests that low frequencies engage additional sensory or emotional circuits beyond traditional auditory pathways, and that EDA provides a more objective and practical measure of emotional responses in naturalistic environments. Overall, bass amplification effectively enhances the emotional music experience, and EDA is a valuable tool for objectively capturing emotional responses in live settings. • Bass amplification significantly increases music-evoked arousal, particularly in live music settings. • Electrodermal activity provides a more sensitive and practical measure of emotional engagement than electroencephalography. • Our results suggest that bass affects emotional experience through mechanisms beyond low-level auditory processing.