“I felt it in my chest” is a description, not a measurement
People describe deep sound as pressure, heaviness, buzzing, movement or impact. Those experiences matter, but they do not reveal one unique physical mechanism. A strong auditory sensation can feel bodily. A floor can transmit mechanical motion through someone's feet. A chair may vibrate. Attention can make an existing sensation more noticeable. Several routes may operate at once.
This is a central KLAAT distinction: felt music is not one physical channel. The experience may be unified even though the signals reaching the listener are not.
Air is not the floor
A microphone measures changing pressure in the air. An accelerometer measures the movement of a structure. Those are different quantities. A deep acoustic note measured at the microphone does not prove that the floor is shaking; a vibrating wooden platform does not tell us exactly what a listener's ears receive.
The room itself complicates things. Low frequencies create position-dependent peaks and dips indoors. Moving a few feet may change the acoustic balance substantially. Contact with furniture, footwear and posture may change the mechanical signal reaching the body. There is no single seat called “the room.”
More bass is not always more experience
Controlled studies outside KLAAT show that added very-low-frequency energy or tactile stimulation can change movement and some subjective responses in certain conditions. But those findings cannot be reduced to “more bass causes trance.” Movement, groove, enjoyment, comfort and absorption are different outcomes.
KLAAT is interested in whether hearing and touch tell the same temporal story. A drum attack heard through the ears and felt through a seat might be experienced as one coherent impact. That possibility depends on timing, delivery and context—not just on maximum vibration.
The body map is constructed
A listener can sincerely report that a sensation traveled along the back without that report being a literal map of where a measurable vibration moved. Sensory systems integrate information and sometimes create convincing perceived locations or motion.
Calling a sensation perceptually constructed does not dismiss it. It means reported bodily experience and physical propagation should be investigated separately. A good research project has room for both personal description and instrument readings.
A practical next step
If we want to study a KLAAT performance, we should record the microphone location, the listening position, the kind of floor or seating, duration and sound level, and any relevant structural measurements. Audience comfort and hearing safety come first.
The goal is not to turn every performance into a laboratory. It is to avoid mistaking an intriguing sensation for proof of a mechanism we have not measured.