The Psychology of Awe at Music Festivals

Vastness and the Need for Accommodation

Psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt linked awe to two central features: perceived vastness and a "need for accommodation." Vastness can be physical—the Tomorrowland Mainstage seen 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 exceeds everyday experience.

The "need for accommodation" refers 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.

How Awe Affects Attention and Presence

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 recognize 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.

Personal History Shapes the Experience

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.

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.