Music and Emotions in the Brain: Familiarity Matters

Abstract

The importance of music in our daily life has given rise to an increased number of studies addressing the brain regions involved in its appreciation. Some of these studies controlled only for the familiarity of the stimuli, while others relied on pleasantness ratings, and others still on musical preferences. With a listening test and a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment, we wished to clarify the role of familiarity in the brain correlates of music appreciation by controlling, in the same study, for both familiarity and musical preferences. First, we conducted a listening test, in which participants rated the familiarity and liking of song excerpts from the pop/rock repertoire, allowing us to select a personalized set of stimuli per subject. Then, we used a passive listening paradigm in fMRI to study music appreciation in a naturalistic condition with increased ecological value. Brain activation data revealed that broad emotion-related limbic and paralimbic regions as well as the reward circuitry were significantly more active for familiar relative to unfamiliar music. Smaller regions in the cingulate cortex and frontal lobe, including the motor cortex and Broca's area, were found to be more active in response to liked music when compared to disliked one. Hence, familiarity seems to be a crucial factor in making the listeners emotionally engaged with music, as revealed by fMRI data.

Effects of musical valence on the cognitive processing of lyrics

“…The questionnaire While literature does suggest increased emotional response to familiar songs Pereira et al, 2011), original songs were chosen as they would not interact with pre-learned expectations of the lyrics, or introduce variability in episodic memories linked to familiar songs. In addition, the music was written and recorded for the same instrument, by the same composer, and sung by the same voice, which minimises variability across stimuli.…”

Hidden sources of joy, fear, and sadness: Explicit versus implicit neural processing of musical emotions

“…The main structures associated with music emotion perception include the bilateral auditory cortices, orbitofrontal cortex, cingulate cortex, parahippocampal gyrus, right nucleus accumbens, and the bilateral amygdala (Kolesch, 2014). A few functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies (Menon & Levitin, 2005;Pereira et al, 2011) found evidence of activity in emotion-related brain structures even if subjects were not concentrating on an emotion-related task during scanning. However, those studies did not include an explicit emotion-listening condition.…”

Dynamics of brain activity underlying working memory for music in a naturalistic condition

“…This allowed subjects to move away from possible mental states arising from such target detection tasks that may not be characteristic of brain's behaviour in more natural, attentive situations. Such paradigm constitutes an unusual approach as opposed to the usual practice in research studies focusing on auditory processing in the brain (Koelsch et al, 2009, Pallesen, Brattico, Bailey, Korvenoja, Koivisto, Gjedde, & Carlson, 2010Pereira, Teixeira, Figueiredo, Xavier, Castro, & Brattico, 2011;Brattico, Alluri, Bogert, Jacobsen, Vartiainen, Nieminen, & Tervaniemi, 2011;Levitin & Menon, 2003;Janata, Tillmann, & Bharucha, 2002). Even if still ecologically significant, findings derived from traditional approaches employing artificially controlled musical stimuli would need to be validated against results coming from rich, naturalistic approaches, more representative of the complex auditory phenomena the brain has evolved to respond to.…”