The ability to recognise basic emotions in music, such as happiness and sadness, is a universal skill that does non always depend on previous exposure to the musical mode (Fritz et al. 2009). There is growing recognition of the variety of emotional states that music tin express (Zentner et al – see my previous web log on complex musical emotions) and the speed at which nosotros can correctly identify these states (as quick as 500ms!)

Nosotros know that the structures within music aid to communicate happiness and sadness:

Sad music = soft dynamics, legato articulation, soft tempo and small-scale mode

Happy music = staccato articulation, louder intensities and major mode

A new article seeks to tackle the next logical question for music emotion studies – is at that place an additional influence of lyrics?

Bob Dylan

Almost studies that present music in order to measure resulting perceptual, cognitive or affective responses stick to using instrumental works. The chief justification for doing this is to avoid any confounding influences of activating the language system. This is a completely reasonable statement if your aim is to isolate the cognitive or neural processing of music. But it leaves u.s.a. unable to describe conclusions most a large proportion of the world'due south music – vocal music (east.g. pop, rock and folk music).

A new study by Elvira Brattico and her colleagues in Republic of finland and Germany has looked at fMRI brain activation when people mind to happy and sad music with and without lyrics. They opted to motility on from the typical use of western classical music and to use a range of music genres and timbres, as selected by 15 participants who had a broad range of musical grooming.

Participants selected 16 eighteen second excerpts of music: 4 sad and 4 happy that they liked and that they didn't like.  They listened to them while in a 3T fMRI scanner and rated them again for liking and emotion (happy or sad?)

RESULTS

i) Acoustic analysis: The authors analysed low level audio-visual features of the music itself to determine if there were any patters that marked a piece as happy or distressing. They focused on the set on slope and the spectral centroid (i.e. timbre, brightness) as well as tempo and mode. They found:

Happy music with lyrics: Faster set on than happy music without lyrics and all sad music. Information technology besides had the brightest timbres compared to all other categories.

Happy music: Brighter timbres and faster tempos compared to lamentable music. It was also more often in the major mode.

Music with lyrics: Brighter timbres than music without lyrics.

2) fMRI analysis

Sad music with lyrics: Unique activation in several brain areas that were not active when lyrics were absent, including parahippocampal gyrus, amgydala, medial and inferior frontal gyri (including Broca's area) and the auditory cortex

Happy music with lyrics: Auditory regions lonely

Happy music without lyrics: Limbic organisation and inferior frontal gyrus

CONCLUSION

There were few acoustic differences between music with and without lyrics. There were far larger acoustic differences between happy and pitiful music. The authors concluded that whatever differential affects driven by the presence of lyrics in the scanner would be as a result of the semantic bear on of the words rather than their acoustic features.

  • Lyrics are crucial for defining sadness in music. The presence of lyrics in lamentable music was associated with brain activations that take previously been reported in response to music chills (see previous blog), judgments of dazzler, demanding speech tasks and the human "mirror neuron" arrangement.
  • By comparison, acoustic features are primal to defining happiness in musi c . Instrumental happy music triggered more potent activations in the emotion-related limbic regions, in comparing to lyrical music.

Happy music was besides associated with more left hemisphere activeness, whether or not it contained lyrics. The authors explain this finding equally existence due to the acoustic features of happy music, including the faster attack and brighter timbres. There is growing testify to support the theory (Zatorre et al. 2002) that the left hemisphere is not so much linguistic communication dominant just dominant for sounds that comprise fast specto-temporal transitions (including language but also happy music)

There were many other specific findings inside the newspaper but that summary gives you a flavour of the major results and their interpretations. Overall, the paper gives insight into the effects of lyrics on the neural processing of homo emotion in a range of musical styles and opens the door for a greater understanding of the potential outcome of song, not but instrumental music, on our minds.