Editorial
Why We Feel Awe at Music Festivals
Why We Feel Awe at Music Festivals and what happens in the brain when scale, music and shared experiences become overwhelming
For many people, the strongest memories from music festivals come from moments that are hard to explain in the moment, whether it is seeing a huge stage for the first time, hearing a favourite artist live or finally experiencing a set they have waited years for. Psychologists describe this feeling as awe, an emotional response that can happen when something feels so vast or extraordinary that it exceeds what we normally expect. Music festivals are especially capable of creating that response through their scale, sound, visual production and shared experience. At events such as Tomorrowland and Electric Daisy Carnival (EDC), that can turn a single performance or stage reveal into something that feels much bigger than just another set, helping explain why certain festival moments can stay so clear in memory long after the event is over.
What Awe Actually Means
What makes these moments different from ordinary excitement comes down to how psychologists understand awe itself. In a foundational theory by Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, awe was linked to two central features: perceived vastness and a “need for accommodation.” Vastness can be physical, which is easy to understand when someone sees the Tomorrowland Mainstage in person for the first time, but it can also describe an experience that feels far bigger than what someone normally encounters. The scale of a music festival, the size of the production and thousands of people gathered around the same performance can all contribute to that sense that what is happening in front of you exceeds everyday experience.
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The “need for accommodation” goes a step further, referring to moments that do not fit neatly into what we already expected or imagined. Someone may have watched festival sets online for years or followed Calvin Harris, Martin Garrix or Swedish House Mafia long before finally seeing them on a major festival stage, yet the real experience brings in the volume, production, physical presence and scale that a screen cannot fully reproduce. Experiencing all of that in person can feel both familiar and much bigger than expected, which is where awe can begin to separate that moment from simply enjoying another set at a music festival.
Why Awe Can Make Us Feel Completely Present
Once awe has been triggered, it can begin to affect where our attention goes. An fMRI study found lower activity in several regions of the default mode network, which is associated with self-reflection and mind-wandering, while participants watched awe-inducing videos. When researchers compared absorbed viewing with a task that required participants to count changes in camera perspective, the findings suggested that awe was linked to deeper attention towards the experience itself.
That kind of absorption is easy to recognise during music festivals, especially during performances where there is already a lot competing for the senses. Watching Eric Prydz HOLO at Coachella, standing inside the scale of Ultra Music Festival or hearing a track such as Avicii’s Levels played across a festival can pull attention so completely into the music and visuals that checking a phone, thinking about time or worrying about what comes next briefly falls away. Research has also connected awe with a smaller sense of self, which may help explain why people can feel intensely present while also feeling like one small part of something much larger happening around them. The brain has not stopped working during those moments; its attention has simply become far more concentrated on the experience unfolding in front of it.
Why Awe Can Feel So Personal
The same festival moment will not necessarily create the same sense of awe for everyone, partly because people come into it with very different expectations and histories with the music they are hearing. Familiarity might seem like it should reduce awe, since something experienced repeatedly becomes less likely to challenge what we already know, yet music complicates that relationship because knowing a track, artist or performance history well can also make seeing it live more meaningful. Hardwell’s return at Ultra Music Festival in 2022 meant something very different to people who had followed him before he stepped away from touring, while Daft Punk’s 2006 Coachella performance showed how familiar music could still create a completely new experience when audiences saw the pyramid production for the first time.
That personal history becomes even more significant with Avicii, whose music can now bring back memories of both his career and the years since his death. At Tomorrowland in 2018, artists including Nicky Romero, Axwell Λ Ingrosso, Don Diablo and Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike paid tribute to him, with a giant Swedish flag bearing Avicii’s image spread across the audience during Nicky Romero’s Mainstage set.
For people who had watched Avicii play Tomorrowland years earlier, hearing tracks such as Levels there after his death could bring back those original performances while giving the song a very different meaning in the same festival setting. A track once connected to seeing Avicii perform could now also bring back the loss of an artist they could no longer see live, showing how personal history can influence why one familiar festival moment creates a much stronger sense of awe than another.
That is ultimately what makes awe such a powerful part of the music festival experience, because the moments that affect us most are rarely only about what is happening on stage. They can carry years of anticipation, memories attached to particular songs and the feeling of experiencing something that, for a few minutes, seems much bigger than everyday life. It helps explain why someone can attend dozens of sets across a festival weekend and still come home thinking about one specific moment long afterwards, with the music, the setting and the feeling of being there still unusually clear.
