Dataset Information

What makes music memorable? Relationships between acoustic musical features and music-evoked emotions and memories in older adults.

ABSTRACT:

Background and objectives

Music has a unique capacity to evoke both strong emotions and vivid autobiographical memories. Previous music information retrieval (MIR) studies have shown that the emotional experience of music is influenced by a combination of musical features, including tonal, rhythmic, and loudness features. Here, our aim was to explore the relationship between music-evoked emotions and music-evoked memories and how musical features (derived with MIR) can predict them both.

Methods

Healthy older adults (N = 113, age ≥ 60 years) participated in a listening task in which they rated a total of 140 song excerpts comprising folk songs and popular songs from 1950s to 1980s on five domains measuring the emotional (valence, arousal, emotional intensity) and memory (familiarity, autobiographical salience) experience of the songs. A set of 24 musical features were extracted from the songs using computational MIR methods. Principal component analyses were applied to reduce multicollinearity, resulting in six core musical components, which were then used to predict the behavioural ratings in multiple regression analyses.

Results

All correlations between behavioural ratings were positive and ranged from moderate to very high (r = 0.46-0.92). Emotional intensity showed the highest correlation to both autobiographical salience and familiarity. In the MIR data, three musical components measuring salience of the musical pulse (Pulse strength), relative strength of high harmonics (Brightness), and fluctuation in the frequencies between 200-800 Hz (Low-mid) predicted both music-evoked emotions and memories. Emotional intensity (and valence to a lesser extent) mediated the predictive effect of the musical components on music-evoked memories.

Conclusions

The results suggest that music-evoked emotions are strongly related to music-evoked memories in healthy older adults and that both music-evoked emotions and memories are predicted by the same core musical features.

SUBMITTER: Salakka I

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8121320 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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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.