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Temporal dynamics of musical emotions examined through intersubject synchrony of brain activity.

ABSTRACT: To study emotional reactions to music, it is important to consider the temporal dynamics of both affective responses and underlying brain activity. Here, we investigated emotions induced by music using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with a data-driven approach based on intersubject correlations (ISC). This method allowed us to identify moments in the music that produced similar brain activity (i.e. synchrony) among listeners under relatively natural listening conditions. Continuous ratings of subjective pleasantness and arousal elicited by the music were also obtained for the music outside of the scanner. Our results reveal synchronous activations in left amygdala, left insula and right caudate nucleus that were associated with higher arousal, whereas positive valence ratings correlated with decreases in amygdala and caudate activity. Additional analyses showed that synchronous amygdala responses were driven by energy-related features in the music such as root mean square and dissonance, while synchrony in insula was additionally sensitive to acoustic event density. Intersubject synchrony also occurred in the left nucleus accumbens, a region critically implicated in reward processing. Our study demonstrates the feasibility and usefulness of an approach based on ISC to explore the temporal dynamics of music perception and emotion in naturalistic conditions.

SUBMITTER: Trost W

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4666110 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Temporal dynamics of musical emotions examined through intersubject synchrony of brain activity.

Trost Wiebke W Frühholz Sascha S Cochrane Tom T Cojan Yann Y Vuilleumier Patrik P

Social cognitive and affective neuroscience 20150519 12

To study emotional reactions to music, it is important to consider the temporal dynamics of both affective responses and underlying brain activity. Here, we investigated emotions induced by music using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with a data-driven approach based on intersubject correlations (ISC). This method allowed us to identify moments in the music that produced similar brain activity (i.e. synchrony) among listeners under relatively natural listening conditions. Continuous ...[more]

PMID: 25994970

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Project description:Music tempo is closely connected to listeners' musical emotion and multifunctional neural activities. Music with increasing tempo evokes higher emotional responses and music with decreasing tempo enhances relaxation. However, the neural substrate of emotion evoked by dynamically changing tempo is still unclear. To investigate the spatial connectivity and temporal dynamic functional network connectivity (dFNC) of musical emotion evoked by dynamically changing tempo, we collected dynamic emotional ratings and conducted group independent component analysis (ICA), sliding time window correlations, and k-means clustering to assess the FNC of emotion evoked by music with decreasing tempo (180-65 bpm) and increasing tempo (60-180 bpm). Music with decreasing tempo (with more stable dynamic valences) evoked higher valence than increasing tempo both with stronger independent components (ICs) in the default mode network (DMN) and sensorimotor network (SMN). The dFNC analysis showed that with time-decreasing FNC across the whole brain, emotion evoked by decreasing music was associated with strong spatial connectivity within the DMN and SMN. Meanwhile, it was associated with strong FNC between the DMN-frontoparietal network (FPN) and DMN-cingulate-opercular network (CON). The paired t-test showed that music with a decreasing tempo evokes stronger activation of ICs within DMN and SMN than that with an increasing tempo, which indicated that faster music is more likely to enhance listeners' emotions with multifunctional brain activities even when the tempo is slowing down. With increasing FNC across the whole brain, music with an increasing tempo was associated with strong connectivity within FPN; time-decreasing connectivity was found within CON, SMN, VIS, and between CON and SMN, which explained its unstable valence during the dynamic valence rating. Overall, the FNC can help uncover the spatial and temporal neural substrates of musical emotions evoked by dynamically changing tempi.

Project description:BackgroundMany studies have examined the perception of musical emotion using excerpts from familiar music that includes highly expressed emotions to classify emotional choices. However, using familiar music to study musical emotions in people with acquired hearing loss could produce ambiguous results as to whether the emotional perception is due to previous experiences or listening to the current musical stimuli. To overcome this limitation, we developed new musical stimuli to study emotional perception without the effects of episodic memory.MethodsA musician was instructed to compose five melodies with evenly distributed pitches around 1 kHz. The melodies were created to express the emotions of happy, sad, angry, tender, and neutral. To evaluate whether these melodies expressed the intended emotions, two methods were applied. First, we classified the expressed emotions of melodies with selected musical features from 60 features using genetic algorithm-based k-nearest neighbors. Second, forty-four people with normal hearing participated in an online survey regarding the emotional perception of music based on dimensional and discrete approaches to evaluate the musical stimuli set.ResultsTwenty-four selected musical features produced classification for intended emotions with an accuracy of 76%. The results of the online survey in the normal hearing (NH) group showed that the intended emotions were selected significantly more often than the others. K-means clustering analysis revealed that melodies with arousal and valence ratings corresponded to representative quadrants of interest. Additionally, the applicability of the stimuli was tested in 4 individuals with high-frequency hearing loss.ConclusionBy applying the individuals with NH, the musical stimuli were shown to classify emotions with high accuracy, as expressed. These results confirm that the set of musical stimuli can be used to study the perceived emotion in music, demonstrating the validity of the musical stimuli, independent of innate musical bias such as due to episodic memory. Furthermore, musical stimuli could be helpful for further studying perceived musical emotion in people with hearing loss because of the controlled pitch for each emotion.

Dataset Information

Temporal dynamics of musical emotions examined through intersubject synchrony of brain activity.

Publications

Temporal dynamics of musical emotions examined through intersubject synchrony of brain activity.

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