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A functional MRI study of happy and sad emotions in music with and without lyrics

Musical emotions,such as happiness and sadness,have been investigated using instrumental music devoid of linguistic content. However, pop and rock, the most common musical genres, utilize lyrics for conveying emotions. Using participants’ self-selected musical excerpts, we studied their behavior and brain responses to elucidate how lyrics interact with musical emotion processing, as reflected by emotion recognition and activation of limbic areas involved in affective experience. We extracted samples from subjects’ selections of sad and happy pieces and sorted them according to the presence of lyrics. Acoustic feature analysis showed that music with lyrics differed from music without lyrics in spectral centroid, a feature related toperceptual brightness,whereassadmusicwithlyricsdidnotdivergefromhappymusicwithoutlyrics,indicatingtheroleofotherfactorsinemotionclassification.Behavioralratingsrevealedthathappymusicwithoutlyricsinducedstrongerpositiveemotionsthanhappymusicwithlyrics.Wealsoacquiredfunctionalmagneticres-onanceimagingdatawhilesubjectsperformedaffectivetasksregardingthemusic.First,usingecologicalandacousticallyvariablestimuli,webroadenedpreviousfindingsaboutthebrainprocessingofmusicalemotionsandofsongsversusinstrumentalmusic.Addition-ally,contrastsbetweensadmusicwithversuswithoutlyricsrecruitedtheparahippocampalgyrus,theamygdala,theclaustrum,theputamen,theprecentralgyrus,themedialandinfe-riorfrontalgyri(includingBroca’sarea),andtheauditorycortex,whilethereversecontrastproducednoactivations.Happymusicwithoutlyricsactivatedstructuresofthelimbicsys-temandtherightparsopercularisoftheinferiorfrontalgyrus,whereasauditoryregionsalonerespondedtohappymusicwithlyrics.Thesefindingspointtotheroleofacousticcuesfortheexperienceofhappinessinmusicandtotheimportanceoflyricsforsadmusicalemotions.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa:de:qucosa:80177
Date27 July 2022
CreatorsBrattico, Elvira, Alluri, Vinoo, Bogert, Brigitte, Jacobsen, Thomas, Vartiainen, Nuutti, Nieminen, Sirke, Tervaniemi, Mari
PublisherFrontiers Media
Source SetsHochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typeinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion, doc-type:article, info:eu-repo/semantics/article, doc-type:Text
Rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Relation308

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