Cross-classification of musical and vocal emotions in the auditory cortex

Paquette, S., Takerkart, S., Saget, S., Peretz, I. and Belin, P. (2018) Cross-classification of musical and vocal emotions in the auditory cortex. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1423(1), pp. 329-337. (doi: 10.1111/nyas.13666) (PMID:29741242)

Abstract

Whether emotions carried by voice and music are processed by the brain using similar mechanisms has long been investigated. Yet neuroimaging studies do not provide a clear picture, mainly due to lack of control over stimuli. Here, we report a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study using comparable stimulus material in the voice and music domains—the Montreal Affective Voices and the Musical Emotional Bursts—which include nonverbal short bursts of happiness, fear, sadness, and neutral expressions. We use a multivariate emotion‐classification fMRI analysis involving cross‐timbre classification as a means of comparing the neural mechanisms involved in processing emotional information in the two domains. We find, for affective stimuli in the violin, clarinet, or voice timbres, that local fMRI patterns in the bilateral auditory cortex and upper premotor regions support above‐chance emotion classification when training and testing sets are performed within the same timbre category. More importantly, classifier performance generalized well across timbre in cross‐classifying schemes, albeit with a slight accuracy drop when crossing the voice–music boundary, providing evidence for a shared neural code for processing musical and vocal emotions, with possibly a cost for the voice due to its evolutionary significance.

• Item Type: Articles
• Additional Information: S.P. was sup-ported by a European Union Erasmus Mundus mobility fellowship in Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience and a fellowship from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. P.B. was supported by Grants BBJ003654/1 and BB/1006494/1 from the British Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, Grant AJE201214 from the French Fondation pour la Recherche Medicale, and Grants ANR-16-CONV-0002 (Institute for Language, Communication and the Brain) and ANR-11-LABX-0036 (Brain and Language Research Institute) and the Excellence Initiative of Aix-Marseille University (A*MIDEX). S.P., P.B.,and I.P. developed the project.
• Keywords: General biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology, history and philosophy of science
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Paquette, Mr Sebastien and Belin, Professor Pascal
• Authors: Paquette, S., Takerkart, S., Saget, S., Peretz, I., and Belin, P.
• College/School: College of Medical Veterinary and Life Sciences > School of Psychology & Neuroscience
• Journal Name: Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
• Publisher: New York Academy of Sciences
• ISSN: 0077-8923
• ISSN (Online): 1749-6632
• Published Online: 09 May 2018
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2018 The New York Academy of Sciences
• First Published: First published in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1423(1):329-337