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Part VII: Music and the Emotional Brain

Music experience is intimately related to its emotional appeal.1 This emotional power is something of a mystery or paradox because of the abstract, nonrepresentational nature of much music. Musical sequences do not refer to specific events in the external world in the way that verbal utterances do.2 Nevertheless, for most of us, participating in musical activities or simply listening to music produces exquisite pleasure. The question is, Where does the emotional power of musical activities come from? Many psychologists would argue that we treat music as intentional and personal, emanating from a person (persona, agent) with communicative intentions. One possible origin of the emotional power is the highly emotional vocal communication that is directed to the infant. Juslin and Laukka3 have come to the conclusion on the basis of a recent metanalysis of behavioral and acoustical studies that listeners perceive music as expressive of emotions because music mimics vocal expression in speech. However, infants prefer singing to speaking,4 suggesting that music is more powerful for expressing emotions. Interestingly, maternal singing is not only emotionally engaging, it is also highly individuated, suggesting that singing may act as a vocal signature of the mother.5 From this perspective, musical effects on emotions may be universal and also unique, depending on individual experience. Indeed, emotional appraisal of music is modulated by prior experience. The “mere exposure effect” on musical taste is a well-established phenomenon. As listeners, we tend to like what we already know. We prefer familiar over unfamiliar music, even after a single prior exposure and often without awareness.6 This unconscious effect of prior exposure to music may account for a vast array of phenomena, such as the preference for consonance over dissonance7 and the association of the major and minor modes with happy and sad emotions (e.g., Refs. 8 and 9). Here, Samson and Peretz10 examine this relationship between music liking and prior exposure in patients with damage to brain structures known to be involved in both memory (e.g., the hippocampus) and emotions (e.g., the amygdala). In doing so, they find that memory and preferences are tightly connected, making music memorable despite the presence of severe memory losses in other domains.