The Difference Between Vocal And Instrumental Emotional Perception And Its Causes

In the modern society,music is ubiquitous.Listening to music has become a life style for modern people.For most of normal people without formal music training,the main purpose of music listening is to regulate their emotion,although the aesthetic appreciation is the main function of music.Although emotional processing in music contains perception and experience,the present study aimed at emotional perception in music for normal people without formal music training.It is well known that music can be simply divided into vocal and instrumental music.In daily musical listening,most people prefers to vocal music,rather than to instrumental music.This seems to reflect the difference of perception between vocal and instrumental music.However,does this difference real exist? If it does exist,what causes this difference is the underlying mechanism?To this aim,three behavioral and electrophysiological experiments were included in the current study.In order to control the difference of music ability in participant,Montreal Battery Evaluation of Amusia(MBEA)was employed to assess music ability,and only those whose scores ranged from 66 to 78 were selected in the current study.None of the participants had received extracurricular music training.Affective priming experimental paradigm was used in the three experiments,in which musical excerpts were always served as primes,and emotional faces always as targets.Emotional faces were congruent or incongruent to prime music.In Experiment 1,the same musical excerpts were played by violin or sung by singer,and created two musical versions.Compared with the congruent condition,the incongruent condition elicited a larger N400 component for violin version.This N400 effect reflected the processing of extramusical meaning.Compared with the congruent condition,the incongruent condition elicited a larger LPC for vocal version,reflecting the evaluation in the late stage of emotional perception.On the basis of the findings in Experiment 1,Experiment 2 focused on the vocal music.By comparing music with and without lyrics,Experiment 2 discussed whether lyrics affect the perception of music emotion.The results showed that,either for accuracy or reaction time,the performance for music without lyrics is better than music with lyrics,suggesting that the lyrics might interfere the perception of musicemotion.Experiment 3 further investigated the influence of timbre in emotional perception of music.Same music excerpts played by violin,vocal and flute were selected.Compared with the vocal and flute versions,the violin version elicited a N400 effect,while the vocal version did not elicited the N400 effect but a LPC effect.However,neither the N400,nor the LPC effect was elicited by the flute version.Taken together,the current findings suggest that there are difference of the emotional perception between vocal and instrumental music.This difference is attributed to both lyrics and timbre.For instrumental music,it is easy for listeners to perceive musical emotion presented by string than by wind instrument.This is the first to investigate systematically the difference of emotional perception between vocal and instrumental music.The findings provide important evidence for emotion regulation in daily listening and clinical practice in music therapy.