Interaction of music and emotional stimuli in modulating working memory in macaque monkeys

Background music is one of the most frequently encountered contextual factors that affect cognitive and emotional functions in humans. However, it is still unclear whether music induces similar effects in nonhuman primates. Answering this question might bring insight to the long‐lasting question regarding the ability of nonhuman primates in perceiving and dissociating music from other nonmusical acoustic information. In the present study, macaque monkeys were trained to perform a working memory task that required matching visual stimuli. These stimuli had different emotional content (neutral, negative, and positive). Monkeys performed the task within different background acoustic conditions (music, same‐intensity noise, and silence). We hypothesized that the auditory stimuli might interact with emotional information of visual stimuli and modulate monkeys’ performance. Furthermore, if the effects of music and noise on monkeys’ behavioral measures differ it would mean that monkeys perceived and processed music differently. We found that, monkeys committed more errors and were slower when they encountered stimuli with negative or positive emotional content. In the presence of music, the influence of emotional stimuli on monkeys’ performance significantly differed from those of the neutral stimuli, however, in the presence of noise, the effects of emotional stimuli on monkeys’ performance were not distinguishable. The dissociable effects of music and noise on monkeys’ performance show that the effects of emotional stimuli were dependent on the background acoustic conditions. Our findings indicate that background music and the same‐intensity noise were differentially perceived by monkeys and influenced their cognitive functions.     

Dynamic emotional and neural responses to music depend on performance expression and listener experience

Apart from its natural relevance to cognition, music provides a window into the intimate relationships between production, perception, experience, and emotion. Here, emotional responses and neural activity were observed as they evolved together with stimulus parameters over several minutes. Participants listened to a skilled music performance that included the natural fluctuations in timing and sound intensity that musicians use to evoke emotional responses. A mechanical performance of the same piece served as a control. Before and after fMRI scanning, participants reported real-time emotional responses on a 2-dimensional rating scale (arousal and valence) as they listened to each performance. During fMRI scanning, participants listened without reporting emotional responses. Limbic and paralimbic brain areas responded to the expressive dynamics of human music performance, and both emotion and reward related activations during music listening were dependent upon musical training. Moreover, dynamic changes in timing predicted ratings of emotional arousal, as well as real-time changes in neural activity. BOLD signal changes correlated with expressive timing fluctuations in cortical and subcortical motor areas consistent with pulse perception, and in a network consistent with the human mirror neuron system. These findings show that expressive music performance evokes emotion and reward related neural activations, and that music's affective impact on the brains of listeners is altered by musical training. Our observations are consistent with the idea that music performance evokes an emotional response through a form of empathy that is based, at least in part, on the perception of movement and on violations of pulse-based temporal expectancies.     

Universality in the brain while listening to music.

The human brain, which is one of the most complex organic systems, involves billions of interacting physiological and chemical processes that give rise to experimentally observed neuroelectrical activity, which is called an electroencephalogram (EEG). The presence of non-stationarity and intermittency render standard available methods unsuitable for detecting hidden dynamical patterns in the EEG. In this paper, a method that is suitable for non-stationary signals and preserving the phase characteristics and that combines wavelet and Hilbert transforms was applied to multivariate EEG signals from human subjects at rest as well as in different cognitive states: listening to music, listening to text and performing spatial imagination. It was found that, if suitably rescaled, the gamma band EEG over distributed brain areas while listening to music can be described by a universal and homogeneous scaling, whereas this homogeneity in scale is reduced at resting conditions and also during listening to text and performing spatial imagination. The degree of universality is characterized by a Kullback-Leibler divergence measure. By statistical surrogate analysis, nonlinear phase interaction was found to play an important role in exhibiting universality among multiple cortical regions.     

Cross-cultural perspectives on music and musicality

Musical behaviours are universal across human populations and, at the same time, highly diverse in their structures, roles and cultural interpretations. Although laboratory studies of isolated listeners and music-makers have yielded important insights into sensorimotor and cognitive skills and their neural underpinnings, they have revealed little about the broader significance of music for individuals, peer groups and communities. This review presents a sampling of musical forms and coordinated musical activity across cultures, with the aim of highlighting key similarities and differences. The focus is on scholarly and everyday ideas about music—what it is and where it originates—as well the antiquity of music and the contribution of musical behaviour to ritual activity, social organization, caregiving and group cohesion. Synchronous arousal, action synchrony and imitative behaviours are among the means by which music facilitates social bonding. The commonalities and differences in musical forms and functions across cultures suggest new directions for ethnomusicology, music cognition and neuroscience, and a pivot away from the predominant scientific focus on instrumental music in the Western European tradition.     

Envelope reconstruction of speech and music highlights stronger tracking of speech at low frequencies

The human brain tracks amplitude fluctuations of both speech and music, which reflects acoustic processing in addition to the encoding of higher-order features and one’s cognitive state. Comparing neural tracking of speech and music envelopes can elucidate stimulus-general mechanisms, but direct comparisons are confounded by differences in their envelope spectra. Here, we use a novel method of frequency-constrained reconstruction of stimulus envelopes using EEG recorded during passive listening. We expected to see music reconstruction match speech in a narrow range of frequencies, but instead we found that speech was reconstructed better than music for all frequencies we examined. Additionally, models trained on all stimulus types performed as well or better than the stimulus-specific models at higher modulation frequencies, suggesting a common neural mechanism for tracking speech and music. However, speech envelope tracking at low frequencies, below 1 Hz, was associated with increased weighting over parietal channels, which was not present for the other stimuli. Our results highlight the importance of low-frequency speech tracking and suggest an origin from speech-specific processing in the brain.     

Comparison of emotion recognition from facial expression and music

The recognition of basic emotions in everyday communication involves interpretation of different visual and auditory clues. The ability to recognize emotions is not clearly determined as their presentation is usually very short (micro expressions), whereas the recognition itself does not have to be a conscious process. We assumed that the recognition from facial expressions is selected over the recognition of emotions communicated through music. In order to compare the success rate in recognizing emotions presented as facial expressions or in classical music works we conducted a survey which included 90 elementary school and 87 high school students from Osijek (Croatia). The participants had to match 8 photographs of different emotions expressed on the face and 8 pieces of classical music works with 8 offered emotions. The recognition of emotions expressed through classical music pieces was significantly less successful than the recognition of emotional facial expressions. The high school students were significantly better at recognizing facial emotions than the elementary school students, whereas girls were better than boys. The success rate in recognizing emotions from music pieces was associated with higher grades in mathematics. Basic emotions are far better recognized if presented on human faces than in music, possibly because the understanding of facial emotions is one of the oldest communication skills in human society. Female advantage in emotion recognition was selected due to the necessity of their communication with the newborns during early development. The proficiency in recognizing emotional content of music and mathematical skills probably share some general cognitive skills like attention, memory and motivation. Music pieces were differently processed in brain than facial expressions and consequently, probably differently evaluated as relevant emotional clues.     

The perception of music.

A common but none the less remarkable human faculty is the ability to recognize and reproduce familiar pieces of music. No two performances of a given piece will ever be acoustically identical, but a listener can perceive, in both, the same rhythmic and tonal relationships, and can judge whether a particular note or phrase was played out of time or out of tune. The problem considered in this lecture is that of describing the conceptual structures by which we represent Western classical music and the processes by which these structures are created. Some new hypotheses about the perception of rhythm and tonality have been cast in the form of a computer program which will transcribe a live keyboard performance of a classical melody into the equivalent of standard musical notation.     

Effects of bone-conducted music on swimming performance

Music has been shown to be a useful adjunct for many forms of exercise and has been observed to improve athletic performance in some settings. Nonetheless, because of the limited availability of practical applications of sound conduction in water, there are few studies of the effects of music on swimming athletes. The SwiMP3 is a novel device that uses bone conduction as a method to circumvent the obstacles to transmitting high fidelity sound in an aquatic environment. Thus, we studied the influence of music on swimming performance and enjoyment using the SwiMP3. Twenty-four competitive swimmers participated in a randomized crossover design study in which they completed timed swimming trials with and without the use of music delivered via bone conduction with the SwiMP3. Each participant swam four 50-m trials and one 800-m trial and then completed a physical enjoyment survey. Statistically significant improvements in swimming performance times were found in both the 50-m (0.32 seconds; p = 0.013) and 800-m (6.5 seconds; p = 0.031) trials with music using the SwiMP3. There was no significant improvement in physical enjoyment with the device as measured by a validated assessment tool. Bone-conducted music appears to have a salutary influence on swimming performance in a practice environment among competitive adult swimmers.     

Without it no music: cognition,biology and evolution of musicality

Musicality can be defined as a natural, spontaneously developing trait based on and constrained by biology and cognition. Music, by contrast, can be defined as a social and cultural construct based on that very musicality. One critical challenge is to delineate the constituent elements of musicality. What biological and cognitive mechanisms are essential for perceiving, appreciating and making music? Progress in understanding the evolution of music cognition depends upon adequate characterization of the constituent mechanisms of musicality and the extent to which they are present in non-human species. We argue for the importance of identifying these mechanisms and delineating their functions and developmental course, as well as suggesting effective means of studying them in human and non-human animals. It is virtually impossible to underpin the evolutionary role of musicality as a whole, but a multicomponent perspective on musicality that emphasizes its constituent capacities, development and neural cognitive specificity is an excellent starting point for a research programme aimed at illuminating the origins and evolution of musical behaviour as an autonomous trait.     

Evidence for Shared Cognitive Processing of Pitch in Music and Language

Language and music epitomize the complex representational and computational capacities of the human mind. Strikingly similar in their structural and expressive features, a longstanding question is whether the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms underlying these abilities are shared or distinct – either from each other or from other mental processes. One prominent feature shared between language and music is signal encoding using pitch, conveying pragmatics and semantics in language and melody in music. We investigated how pitch processing is shared between language and music by measuring consistency in individual differences in pitch perception across language, music, and three control conditions intended to assess basic sensory and domain-general cognitive processes. Individuals’ pitch perception abilities in language and music were most strongly related, even after accounting for performance in all control conditions. These results provide behavioral evidence, based on patterns of individual differences, that is consistent with the hypothesis that cognitive mechanisms for pitch processing may be shared between language and music.     

Exposure to Mozart music reduces cognitive impairment in pilocarpine-induced status epilepticus rats

Patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) often display cognitive deficits. However, current epilepsy therapeutic interventions mainly aim at how to reduce the frequency and degree of epileptic seizures. Recovery of cognitive impairment is not attended enough, resulting in the lack of effective approaches in this respect. In the pilocarpine-induced temporal lobe epilepsy rat model, memory impairment has been classically reported. Here we evaluated spatial cognition changes at different epileptogenesis stages in rats of this model and explored the effects of long-term Mozart music exposure on the recovery of cognitive ability. Our results showed that pilocarpine rats suffered persisting cognitive impairment during epileptogenesis. Interestingly, we found that Mozart music exposure can significantly enhance cognitive ability in epileptic rats, and music intervention may be more effective for improving cognitive function during the early stages after Status epilepticus. These findings strongly suggest that Mozart music may help to promote the recovery of cognitive damage due to seizure activities, which provides a novel intervention strategy to diminish cognitive deficits in TLE patients.     

Affective responses in tamarins elicited by species-specific music

Theories of music evolution agree that human music has an affective influence on listeners. Tests of non-humans provided little evidence of preferences for human music. However, prosodic features of speech (‘motherese’) influence affective behaviour of non-verbal infants as well as domestic animals, suggesting that features of music can influence the behaviour of non-human species. We incorporated acoustical characteristics of tamarin affiliation vocalizations and tamarin threat vocalizations into corresponding pieces of music. We compared music composed for tamarins with that composed for humans. Tamarins were generally indifferent to playbacks of human music, but responded with increased arousal to tamarin threat vocalization based music, and with decreased activity and increased calm behaviour to tamarin affective vocalization based music. Affective components in human music may have evolutionary origins in the structure of calls of non-human animals. In addition, animal signals may have evolved to manage the behaviour of listeners by influencing their affective state.     

Superior analgesic effect of an active distraction versus pleasant unfamiliar sounds and music: the influence of emotion and cognitive style

Listening to music has been found to reduce acute and chronic pain. The underlying mechanisms are poorly understood; however, emotion and cognitive mechanisms have been suggested to influence the analgesic effect of music. In this study we investigated the influence of familiarity, emotional and cognitive features, and cognitive style on music-induced analgesia. Forty-eight healthy participants were divided into three groups (empathizers, systemizers and balanced) and received acute pain induced by heat while listening to different sounds. Participants listened to unfamiliar Mozart music rated with high valence and low arousal, unfamiliar environmental sounds with similar valence and arousal as the music, an active distraction task (mental arithmetic) and a control, and rated the pain. Data showed that the active distraction led to significantly less pain than did the music or sounds. Both unfamiliar music and sounds reduced pain significantly when compared to the control condition; however, music was no more effective than sound to reduce pain. Furthermore, we found correlations between pain and emotion ratings. Finally, systemizers reported less pain during the mental arithmetic compared with the other two groups. These findings suggest that familiarity may be key in the influence of the cognitive and emotional mechanisms of music-induced analgesia, and that cognitive styles may influence pain perception.     

Neuropsychology: music of the hemispheres

Music may be the food of love but it is also good fodder for cognitive scientists. Here we highlight a recent study of a neuropsychological patient who has lost her ability to read music, but not text, in the absence of any other musical deficit.     

Five fundamental constraints on theories of the origins of music

The diverse forms and functions of human music place obstacles in the way of an evolutionary reconstruction of its origins. In the absence of any obvious homologues of human music among our closest primate relatives, theorizing about its origins, in order to make progress, needs constraints from the nature of music, the capacities it engages, and the contexts in which it occurs. Here we propose and examine five fundamental constraints that bear on theories of how music and some of its features may have originated. First, cultural transmission, bringing the formal powers of cultural as contrasted with Darwinian evolution to bear on its contents. Second, generativity, i.e. the fact that music generates infinite pattern diversity by finite means. Third, vocal production learning, without which there can be no human singing. Fourth, entrainment with perfect synchrony, without which there is neither rhythmic ensemble music nor rhythmic dancing to music. And fifth, the universal propensity of humans to gather occasionally to sing and dance together in a group, which suggests a motivational basis endemic to our biology. We end by considering the evolutionary context within which these constraints had to be met in the genesis of human musicality.     

Principles of structure building in music,language and animal song

Human language, music and a variety of animal vocalizations constitute ways of sonic communication that exhibit remarkable structural complexity. While the complexities of language and possible parallels in animal communication have been discussed intensively, reflections on the complexity of music and animal song, and their comparisons, are underrepresented. In some ways, music and animal songs are more comparable to each other than to language as propositional semantics cannot be used as indicator of communicative success or wellformedness, and notions of grammaticality are less easily defined. This review brings together accounts of the principles of structure building in music and animal song. It relates them to corresponding models in formal language theory, the extended Chomsky hierarchy (CH), and their probabilistic counterparts. We further discuss common misunderstandings and shortcomings concerning the CH and suggest ways to move beyond. We discuss language, music and animal song in the context of their function and motivation and further integrate problems and issues that are less commonly addressed in the context of language, including continuous event spaces, features of sound and timbre, representation of temporality and interactions of multiple parallel feature streams. We discuss these aspects in the light of recent theoretical, cognitive, neuroscientific and modelling research in the domains of music, language and animal song.     

Integrating music in breathing training and relaxation: I. Background, rationale, and relevant elements

Quasiformal reports of widespread use of music in counterarousal techniques abound despite little evidence of its psychophysiological effects. Some known effects are presented here, and they suggest, among other things, an influence on hemispheric dominance, changes in autonomic nervous system activity, and relaxation by paradoxical arousal patterns contrary to those in cognitive function and anxiety. Hypothetical subcortical reflexes are postulated as mediators. Different types of music and their effect are described. Of particular relevance is that some forms of music have been reliably shown to have a profound beneficial effect on breathing.     

Joint music making promotes prosocial behavior in 4-year-old children

Humans are the only primates that make music. But the evolutionary origins and functions of music are unclear. Given that in traditional cultures music making and dancing are often integral parts of important group ceremonies such as initiation rites, weddings or preparations for battle, one hypothesis is that music evolved into a tool that fosters social bonding and group cohesion, ultimately increasing prosocial in-group behavior and cooperation. Here we provide support for this hypothesis by showing that joint music making among 4-year-old children increases subsequent spontaneous cooperative and helpful behavior, relative to a carefully matched control condition with the same level of social and linguistic interaction but no music. Among other functional mechanisms, we propose that music making, including joint singing and dancing, encourages the participants to keep a constant audiovisual representation of the collective intention and shared goal of vocalizing and moving together in time — thereby effectively satisfying the intrinsic human desire to share emotions, experiences and activities with others.     

Integrating music in breathing training and relaxation: I. Background,rationale, and relevant elements

Quasiformal reports of widespread use of music in counterarousal techniques abound despite little evidence of its psychophysiological effects. Some known effects are presented here, and they suggest, among other things, an influence on hemispheric dominance, changes in autonomic nervous system activity, and relaxation by paradoxical arousal patterns contrary to those in cognitive function and anxiety. Hypothetical subcortical reflexes are postulated as mediators. Different types of music and their effect are described. Of particular relevance is that some forms of music have been reliably shown to have a profound beneficial effect on breathing.A number of references cited in this report are based on anecdotal observations lacking empirical validation and should be interpreted in that vein. I thank Cheryl Marant for bringining to my attention several important articles on music and stress.     

Dynamic properties of segmental characteristics of EEG alpha activity in rest conditions and during cognitive tasks

Segmental structure of the alpha activity of human EEG was studied in the state of rest and during arithmetical task performance with mono- and binaural listening of task instruction and binaural listening of music. The amplitude, duration, amplitude variability and steepness of between-segment transitions were calculated as segmental characteristics. It was shown that all of these characteristics are sensitive to the cognitive tests but the degree of this sensitivity depends on the cortex area and type of the cognitive task. Most pronounced changes in the segmental characteristics were observed during arithmetic task with left-side instruction presentation and minimal changes were seen during binaural listening of music.