Research
Toward the relationship between emotions, musical structure and music performance.
Several studies have investigated the relationship between musical structure and primary perceived emotions using various rating tests. However, as music is intrinsically a temporal phenomenon, our work will focus on the dynamic aspects of music-induced emotion. We therefore will analyse the relation between various musical features and basic dimensions of emotion by using techniques enabling online tracking of the development of musical features and emotion analysis as well as underlying neural activity. Moreover, we will focus on performance strategies and in particular on how the manipulation of different acoustic cues can influence the perception and communication of emotion. The latter will explore very different music genres, such as classical music and DJ scratching. To understand the interplay between emotion and the various features of musical structure and music performance, we will combine behavioural and computational methods.
What are the neural determinants of music appreciation and emotions?
The Psychology of Aesthetics is an old branch of Experimental Psychology that is currently gaining new momentum in the light of neurocognitive methodology and paradigms. The Neuroaesthetics of Music is the field that focuses on music processing within this framework. In this workpackage, we explore the knowledge structure underlying music appreciation. The conceptual structure of the aesthetics of music is investigated. These knowledge representations reflect music training, expertise and cultural background. This acquired background affects our emotional as well as aesthetic responses to music. Consequently, it also has an effect on the brain correlates of emotional responses to music as well as aesthetic judgements of music. We will rely on functional brain imaging techniques for the investigations of the brain sources and the time courses of these processes. In doing so, careful psychological experimentation will allow us to illuminate the interplay of emotional and aesthetic processing of music in its neural correlates.
How do music appreciation and emotions emerge in the human brain?
Infants show sophisticated abilities to acquire knowledge about musical syntax. This strongly supports the notion that musicality is a natural ability of the human brain. There is a natural connection between music and speech and the neural resources for music and language processing in both adults and children seem to be partly overlapping. We intend to find out how very young infants process violations of language-related and musical principles. Children react differentially to music, as they do to everything they encounter. These differences in the styles of reactivity may be due to 1) temperament, the permanent physiology-based property of all humans, 2) learning in the early years – mimicking the reactions of other people lead the child to react in similar ways, 3) possibly to differences in the brain processes related to the processing of auditory input. The detection accuracy of the auditory system to changes of different types (for example, changes in melody, compared to changes in rhythm) differ greatly between individuals. We will address the importance of this detection profile to the reaction styles of children towards music.
What is the biological substrate of individual differences in musical sensitivity, performance and their emotional counterpart?
Musical performance requires complex physical and mental operations such as the translation of visually presented musical symbols into sequential finger movements, with the integration of multimodal sensory and motor information and feedback mechanisms. It is not surprising that this should be reflected in the brain structure and function of musicians in numerous ways, making musical performance an ideal terrain to explore action learning and understanding, and multimodal sensory integration. Successful musical performance also requires the ability to convey emotion and “musical meaning”. Are different musical styles, with their different emphasis on the spontaneous conveying of emotional information, reflected in biological markers? And are action execution and imagery, different in musicians with different styles and emotional profiles? We will use an array of functional and structural neuroimaging, neurophysiological and computational modelling techniques to explore these issues in groups of music experts including players of traditional instrument families (strings, percussion instruments) as well as modern instrumentalists (DJs, performance artists specialized on sound scenes) and singers of several styles (jazz, classical).
How can findings on music emotion processing be implemented in music therapy?
Clinical improvisation is a widely used method of music therapy to investigate and heal the emotional spectrum and the emotional expression of the clients with various forms of psychopathology. Although clinically known, to date, these processes have been only tentatively described. Therefore, we aim at investigating the effect of improvisational music therapy in the treatment of young adults and adults with various forms of psychopathology. In addition to traditional methods of effect measuring in psychiatric context, we will utilize the brain imaging methods as well as the special methods created for assessing the features of improvisational musical expression in regard to recovery.