The sound of emotions—Towards a unifying neural network perspective of affective sound processing

Abstract

Affective sounds are an integral part of the natural and social environment that shape and influence behavior across a multitude of species. In human primates, these affective sounds span a repertoire of environmental and human sounds when we vocalize or produce music. In terms of neural processing, cortical and subcortical brain areas constitute a distributed network that supports our listening experience to these affective sounds. Taking an exhaustive cross-domain view, we accordingly suggest a common neural network that facilitates the decoding of the emotional meaning from a wide source of sounds rather than a traditional view that postulates distinct neural systems for specific affective sound types. This new integrative neural network view unifies the decoding of affective valence in sounds, and ascribes differential as well as complementary functional roles to specific nodes within a common neural network. It also highlights the importance of an extended brain network beyond the central limbic and auditory brain systems engaged in the processing of affective sounds.

Whispering - The hidden side of auditory communication

“…Affective vocalizations elicited activity in the left core and belt regions, and in bilateral higher-level auditory regions in the STC. These auditory subregions have been identified as being relevant for affective voice processing (Beaucousin et al, 2007;Frühholz and Grandjean, 2013a;Frühholz et al, 2015b;Frühholz et al, 2016a). They were located in the bilateral voice-sensitive cortex, and these regions partly overlapped with low frequency fields of the tonotopic frequency maps (b3-4 kHz), and with rather low temporal regularity fields (low modulation (LM)) of the TMR maps .…”

“…In response to voiced vocalizations, activity was found in rACC, which is usually involved in inferring the emotional state of another individual (Frühholz et al, 2009;Frühholz et al, 2016a;Szameitat et al, 2010). Whispered vocalizations elicited activity in the OFC and the IFC, which are involved in the cognitive evaluation of vocalizations (Frühholz and Grandjean, 2013b), especially under demanding task conditions (Leitman et al, 2010).…”

“…The functional role of the auditory cortex has been proposed to underlie the acoustic analysis of physical voice features Wiethoff et al, 2008) and the perceptual integration of voice features into an acoustic percept . Given a sufficient amount of relevant acoustic voice information, such as the level and the temporal dynamics of vocal pitch, pitch salience, intensity, or the harmonics-to-noise ratio (Frühholz et al, 2016b;von Kriegstein et al, 2010), and given the extraction of these voice features in the auditory cortex (Lewis et al, 2012;Lewis et al, 2009;Patterson et al, 2002;Penagos et al, 2004), the auditory cortex might also perform some generic emotional analysis on these voice features and the voice percept without functional support from other brain regions (Frühholz et al, 2016a). This case might be expected for the neural processing of voiced emotional vocalizations given their wide range of distinctive and discriminative acoustic features (Banse and Scherer, 1996).…”

Editorial: The Evolution of Rhythm Cognition: Timing in Music and Speech

“…Another topic of broad interest centers on the relationship between speech, prosody, and music (Toro and Nespor, 2015; Vanden Bosch der Nederlanden et al, 2015; Chang et al, 2016; Filippi, 2016; Frühholz et al, 2016; Kotz and Schwartze, 2016; Schwartze and Kotz, 2016; Weidema et al, 2016; Carr et al, 2017; Ding et al, 2017; Spierings et al, 2017; Toro and Hoeschele, 2017). An intriguing hypothesis is that speech prosody may be the “missing link” between music and language (Filippi, 2016) or that music and language may be preceded by musical prosody (Fitch, 2013; Honing, 2017).…”

The Evolution of Rhythm Cognition: Timing in Music and Speech

“…Another topic of broad interest centers on the relationship between speech, prosody, and music (Toro and Nespor, 2015;Vanden Bosch der Nederlanden et al, 2015;Chang et al, 2016;Filippi, 2016;Frühholz et al, 2016;Kotz and Schwartze, 2016;Schwartze and Kotz, 2016;Weidema et al, 2016;Carr et al, 2017;Ding et al, 2017;Spierings et al, 2017;Toro and Hoeschele, 2017). An intriguing hypothesis is that speech prosody may be the "missing link" between music and language (Filippi, 2016) or that music and language may be preceded by musical prosody (Fitch, 2013;Honing, 2017).…”