In Search of Sublime Music

Since burke (1759/1990) and kant (1790/1922), even subjectivist approaches to the experience of the sublime have claimed that some objects afford it more than others. In 2021, nearly all the participants in the ANR SublimAE questionnaire gave precise answers when asked to identify a piece of music that elicited in them an experience of the sublime. We analyzed this collection of 128 tracks through Music Information Retrieval (MIR) techniques to determine what sonic traits, if any, distinguished these pieces of “sublime music” from those of a second collection, designated by a control group of respondents who answered a question about an experience of the beautiful. The results did not identify a set of recurrent traits in these putatively sublime pieces, except for minor differences of timbre, like a brighter quality of the spectra. Rather, our study suggests that the topical opposition between sublime and beautiful objects is less adequate to understanding the listening experience than a dynamic and continuous view of both the objective and the subjective aspects of these aesthetical categories.