Bass, Emotion, and EEG: When Music Moves the Body Before the Mind

Epain, N., Moulin, S., Mingam, C., Wallerich, M., Corteel, E., & Arnal, L. H. (2025). Bass amplification impacts emotional, neural and physiological responses to music. Applied Acoustics, 241, 110993.

First-Person Consciousness Brain Bee Idea

When a deep bass note passes through the body, something awakens before any thought arises.
The sound hits the chest, the air vibrates, and the body reacts — it doesn’t ask permission from reason.
This instant — pure, immediate, pre-verbal — is what I call First-Person Consciousness.
It is the moment when experience happens before it is interpreted.

I was born to study those moments when the body thinks on its own — when vibration itself becomes knowledge.
And this is precisely what Epain et al. (2025) managed to demonstrate: that music is a biological language, and bass frequencies are its most ancestral grammar.

sfn 2025
NIRS EEG ERP BCI fNIRS
Decolonial Neuroscience
Brain Bee Ideas

The Study

The study examined how bass amplification modifies emotional, neural, and physiological responses to music.
Using EEG and peripheral physiological measures such as skin conductance, the authors showed that low-frequency energy increases emotional intensity and strengthens synchrony between auditory and motor cortices.

The conclusion is clear:
the stronger the bass, the more the body dances — even when still.
And the more the body participates, the more coherent the brain becomes.
Here, emotion does not arise from the mind, it emerges from movement.

Fruição and the Damasian Mind

Fruição (Enjoyment) is the state in which feeling and action coincide, when there is no distance between what happens and what one is.
During musical fruição, the brain does not interpret — it synchronizes.
The body and perception vibrate at the same pulse, and it is this synchrony that releases dopamine and pleasure.

Within the Damasian Mind — the union of interoception (feeling from within) and proprioception (feeling one’s position in space) — fruição represents a metabolic alignment between internal rhythm and the rhythm of the world.
It is not mindfulness; it is embodied consciousness.
The body becomes both stage and instrument.

When bass frequencies hit, blood, heart, and muscle oscillate in micro-rhythms that inform the brain about belonging.
Emotion, then, is not reaction — it is the body’s recognition of sound.

Yãy Hã Miy — Sound as Belonging

Among the Maxakali people, Yãy Hã Miy means to imitate oneself into being — to become what one wishes to understand.
In music, this is literal: when listening, the body imitates sound; when dancing, the sound imitates the body.
Vibration becomes a form of knowledge — a kind of learning without words.

This study confirms what Amerindian cultures have long embodied:
sound is not an external stimulus — it is a relationship of belonging.
Amplifying bass frequencies expands this shared territory between bodies.
It is sound made flesh, the collective body dancing inside each of us.

Evidence and the Body

Epain et al. (2025) demonstrated that:

• Amplified bass increases emotional arousal and cortical activation;
  
  

• EEG reveals enhanced beta-motor coherence, indicating unconscious kinesthetic engagement;
  
  

• Individuals with greater interoceptive sensitivity experience more intense musical pleasure.
  
  

These findings reinforce an idea I always defend:
emotions are bodily mappings before they become conscious feelings.
Music, in this sense, mirrors the emotional metabolism of being human.

A Decolonial Reading

Western science has long treated sound as a physical stimulus and emotion as a cerebral response.
But this study shows the inverse: the body commands the brain.
And this body is not a machine — it is a vibrant territory, a field of sensation.

In Amerindian practices, sound is also a way of aligning oneself with the Earth and other living beings.
When a drum resonates, the body recognizes the planet pulsing within it.
Bass in urban culture is the modern drum — the Earth translated into frequency.

Thus, studying bass and EEG is not merely about musical pleasure; it is an inquiry into the pulsation of human belonging.
Science is beginning to measure what singing and dancing peoples have always lived:
emotion is communion.

EEG-fNIRS and the Musical Body

For those of us working with EEG and fNIRS within the SFN 2025 context, this study opens crucial pathways:

• Measuring auditory-motor entrainment using high-density EEG (Brain Products, LiveAmp, actiCAP);
  
  

• Mapping prefrontal hemodynamic responses during musical pleasure with fNIRS;
  
  

• Quantifying fruição as the coherence between neural and physiological signals.
  
  

These technologies do more than record “data” — they register moments of unity between body and sound.
Neuroscience is finally learning to recognize the spirituality of rhythm.

Conclusion

Epain et al. (2025) go far beyond music research — they offer experimental evidence that consciousness itself begins in movement.
Bass frequencies don’t merely fill auditory space; they restructure the body as a sensory field of the mind.

Emotion, therefore, is not something we feel after.
It is the very act of becoming world.
EEG merely confirms what the heart has always known how to dance.

Keywords and SEO

EEG SFN 2025 • musical emotion • bass amplification • fruição • interoception • body territory • Damasian Mind • Yãy Hã Miy • Brain Products • NIRx • hyperscanning • neuroaesthetics • proprioceptive sound

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