AES Show 2024 NY

Anticipation and pleasure in response to music listening can lead to dopamine release in the human striatal system, a neural midbrain reward and motivation cluster. The sensation of auditory envelopment, however, may also in itself have a stimulating effect. Theoretical reason and circumstantial evidence are given why this could be the case, thereby possibly constituting an auditory complement to a newly discovered and studied percept, affective touch, originating from C-tactile fibres in the skin, stimulated certain ways. In a pilot test, abstract sounds were used to determine the audibility of low frequency inter-aural fluctuation. Naïve subjects aged between 6 and 96 years were all sensitive to the conditions tested and asked to characterize the stimuli in their own words. Based on these results, controlling low frequency inter-aural fluctuation in listeners should be a priority when recording, mixing, distributing and reproducing audio.