Prior research has conjectured ways in which the acoustic and structural cues of music can be listened to as if it were another person. For example, music can be listened to as a superexpressive voice, as gross-motor gestures, or even as a “virtual person.” Such empathic listening enables a listener to engage with the music on a social level. Over the past 50 years, the aesthetic and performative practice of biomusic has created a new type of social listening--listeners hear music that is driven by the neurophysiological processes of a performer. We hypothesized that hearing the physiological state of another person could also engage empathic listening mechanisms and designed an experiment centered around the auditory heartbeat. In our experiment, participants completed modified versions of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task (RMET) randomized and counterbalanced for different auditory heartbeat conditions (slow, fast, silence). For each audio-visual trial, participants completed two measures of empathic state: cognitive (“What is this person feeling?”) and affective (“How well could you feel what they were feeling?”). From our results, we found that the presence of auditory heartbeats i) changed cognitive empathy and ii) increased affective empathy. Furthermore, listeners' empathic responses depended on the tempo of the auditory heartbeat. These results extend empathic listening mechanisms to physiological processes and contribute to our understanding of embodiment in music listening.
