Music To Look Forward To The Mechanism Of Induced Emotional Reactions

Background: People report that their primary motivation for listening to music is its emotional effect. One of the main reasons people give for listening to music is to experience or modulate their emotional state. Meyer (1956) put forward that human listeners necessarily generate (implicit) expectations for what will occur next in melody, rhythm, timbre, and harmony. Depending on whether these expectations are fulfilled or not, listeners experience relaxation or tension. Moreover, the generation of musical expectancy is based on the music-syntax. However, there is now lack of evidence to prove whether the emotional responses induced by musical expectancy and the irregular syntax of Western tonal music recognizing are culturally specific or not. Accordingly, we raise questions of whether musical expectancy also exists in Chinese individuals, its role in musical emotions and its neural mechanisms.Methodology/Principal results: Two researches were included in this work. In the first research (behavioural experiment), subjective response measures for valence and arousal, as well as surprise, were recorded from 20 subjects to observe the effect of expectancy violations (irregular syntax) on subjects'emotional responses of music. We chose piano sonatas with chords that were either expected (syntactically regular) or unexpected (syntactically irregular, originally arranged by composers) or very unexpected (syntactically very irregular). From the musical excerpts played by professional pianists (with emotional expression), we also created versions without variations in tempo and loudness (without musical expression) by computer. In the second research (ERP experiment), based on the first research, an electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded from 28 subjects to further observe the neural mechanisms underlying the information focus of musical expectancy—musical syntactic processing, and the effect of musical emotional expression on these processing. Principal results of this work were as follows: ①Musical expectancy violations also induced emotional responses of Chinese subjects.②Along with the changes of expectancy violations, the emotional responses of subjects varied systematically.③Chinese individuals were also able to process the syntactic regularities in Western tonal music and finish the process of harmonic integration.④The early right anterior negativity (ERAN) and N5 in ERPs were taken to reflect the neural mechanisms underlying musical syntactic and harmonic integrative processing respectively.⑤Both the processing of musical syntax and harmonic integration were influenced by musical emotional expression.Conclusions/Significance: The findings of this work justified the fundamental and universal role of musical expectancy in the mechanisms of musical emotions, and provided the first evidence showing that Chinese individuals were also able to process the syntactic regularities of naturalistic Western tonal music. Meanwhile, the result put forward that the neural mechanism underlying music-syntactic processing was affected by emotional expression. This work provide theoretical basis for the validity of music therapy through investigating emotional responses to music. Meanwhile, it contributes to the scientific choice of music in music therapy through investigating the music-syntax and emotional expression.