Smells like a concert: chemosignals and collective live music events

There is a growing interest in how other people contribute to our own experience of concerts and other collective aesthetic engagements. However, we lack frameworks that connect experiential features with embodied and embedded aspects. What dynamics and processes articulate the collective response to music while remaining open to individual processing? This paper explores one possible pathway: chemosignals. Recent research suggests that these chemicals we constantly emit and inhale convey emotional information from those who produce them and shape cognitive, affective, and behavioral dynamics in those who receive them. Integrating various approaches to the concert experience and empirical research on chemosignals, I will illustrate how the impact of the chemosignals on the vector constituted by emergent patterns of movement and individual respiratory rhythms may be an aspect contributed by other listeners with the potential to shape how we experience collective live musical events.