Emotion
Emotions induced by music activate similar frontal brain regions compared to emotions elicited by other stimuli. Schmidt and Trainor (2001) discovered that valence (i.e. positive vs. negative) of musical segments was distinguished by patterns of frontal EEG activity. Joyful and happy musical segments were associated with increases in left frontal EEG activity whereas fearful and sad musical segments were associated with increases in right frontal EEG activity. Additionally, the intensity of emotions was differentiated by the pattern of overall frontal EEG activity. Overall frontal region activity increased as affective musical stimuli became more intense.
Music is able to create an incredibly pleasurable experience that can be described as "chills". Blood and Zatorre (2001) used PET to measure changes in cerebral blood flow while participants listened to music that they knew to give them the "chills" or any sort of intensely pleasant emotional response. They found that as these chills increase, many changes in cerebral blood flow are seen in brain regions such as the amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, ventral striatum, midbrain, and the ventral medial prefrontal cortex. Many of these areas appear to be linked to reward and motivation, emotion and arousal and are also activated in other pleasurable situations. Nucleus accumbens (a part of striatum) is involved in both music related emotions, as well as rhythmic timing.
When unpleasant melodies are played, the posterior cingulate cortex activates, which indicates a sense of conflict or emotional pain. The right hemisphere has also been found to be correlated with emotion, which can also activate areas in the cingulate in times of emotional pain, specifically social rejection (Eisenberger). This evidence, along with observations, has led many musical theorists, philosophers and neuroscientists to link emotion with tonality. This seems almost obvious because the tones in music seem like a characterization of the tones in human speech, which indicate emotional content. The vowels in the phonemes of a song are elongated for a dramatic effect, and it seems as though musical tones are simply exaggerations of the normal verbal tonality.
Read more about this topic: Amplitude Scaling Invariance
Famous quotes containing the word emotion:
“When the wind carries a cry which is meaningful to human ears, it is simpler to believe the wind shares with us some part of the emotion of Being than that the mysteries of a hurricane’s rising murmur reduce to no more than the random collision of insensate molecules.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the rollercoaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.”
—Carson McCullers (1917–1967)
“I would not unduly praise the virtue of restraint. It is often merely temperamental. But it is not always a sign of coldness. It may be pride. There can be nothing more humiliating than to see the shaft of one’s emotion miss the mark of either laughter or tears. Nothing more humiliating! And this for the reason that should the mark be missed, should the open display of emotion fail to move, then it must perish unavoidably in disgust or contempt.”
—Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)