ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Virtual Real.
Sec. Virtual Reality and Human Behaviour
Volume 6 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frvir.2025.1592652
This article is part of the Research TopicUnlocking the potential of XR: Shaping a pro-social metaverseView all 3 articles
Feeling the music: an investigation of tactile enhancement of music on emotional experiences
Provisionally accepted
- Reichman University, Herzliya, Israel
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Tactile pairing with auditory stimulation has been shown to enhance various capabilities, including the intensity of the stimulus, its location, and its comprehensibility in noise. However the effect of adding haptics on emotional state is still poorly understood, despite the key role of bodily experiences on emotional states. In the current study we aimed to investigate the impact of a multisensory audio-tactile music experience on emotional states and anxiety levels. For this purpose we developed an in-house algorithm and hardware, converting audio information to vibration perceivable through haptics, optimized for music. We compare participants' emotional experiences of music when provided with audio only versus audio-tactile feedback. We further investigate the impact of enabling participants to freely select their music of choice on the experience. Results indicate multisensory music significantly increases positive mood and decreased state anxiety when compared to the audio only condition. These findings underscore the potential of multisensory stimulation and sensory-enhanced music-touch experiences specifically, for emotional regulation. The results are further enhanced when participants are given the autonomy to choose the musical content. We discuss the importance of multisensory enhancement and embodied experiences on emotional states. We further lay out the potential of multisensory experiences towards producing robust representations and touch on the particular potential use cases for technologies which enable controlled multisensory experiences, in particular VR headsets, which increasingly enable multifrequency haptic feedback built into their controllers and APIs.
Keywords: Multisensory (audio / tactile), Music emotion, virtual reality, Sensory enhancement, embodied music cognition, Anxiety, music technology
Received: 12 Mar 2025; Accepted: 28 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Schwartz, Snir and Amedi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Adi Snir, Reichman University, Herzliya, Israel
Amir Amedi, Reichman University, Herzliya, Israel
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.