The Brain Mechanism Of Music Meaning Processin

The study of music meaning has been highly concerned by the ancient and modernmusic scholars around the world; research on this topic originated from the field ofmusical aesthetics, and gradually integrated theories of psychology and otherdisciplines to expand the perspectives of this perennial question. Since21st century,with the development and maturity of brain science and new technologies, researchershave started to use the Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) and other EEG experimenttechniques to explore this classic music enigma.With the attempts to change research methods, integrating different disciplines intechnology and the humanity, this study systematically reviewed the classical theoriesof music meaning in the field of music aesthetics, the main thoughts frompsychological perspective, and the new trends in cognitive neuroscience withrepresentative experiments in this area. Through this review, the study attempts toclarify perspectives and mainly viewpoints on the music meaning within differentdisciplines. Relying on the comparison of meaning in music and language, theexperiment used Event-Related Potentials technique, selected language materials fromClassical Chinese Music Aesthetics Work Xi Shan Qin Kuang with hundreds of musicexcerpts from different periods in Chinese and Western music history.12musicianand12non-musician subjects participated in this study. In the respect of all subjects’behavior data, EEG data and subjective assessment, when taken music materials asprime stimulus and language materials as target stimulus, an N400was elicited afterlanguage materials was presented. Most importantly, music subjects able to elicit anN400during the process of listen to music as well. In conclusion, music does possesssemantic meaning from cognitive neuroscience perspective. Furthermore, theexperiment results also illustrate the basic formation process of music meaning in thehuman brain, the similarities and differences in the processing of meaning in musicand language, the commonness and diversities in music meaning understanding ofmusic and non-music groups. Confirmed by the results that the basic ability of musicmeaning perception could be acquired by the influence of social-musical environment,and become more in-depth and comprehensive through further professional musiclearning. The conclusion of this study not only further enriches the existing researchof music meaning, but also provides certain reference value to the construction of a better social-musical environment, the reflection of music teaching and learningapproaches, and better understanding of the relationship between human and music.