Elsevier

Cognition

Volume 68, Issue 2, August 1998, Pages 111-141
Cognition

Music and emotion: perceptual determinants, immediacy, and isolation after brain damage

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0010-0277(98)00043-2Get rights and content

Abstract

This study grew out of the observation of a remarkable sparing of emotional responses to music in the context of severe deficits in music processing after brain damage in a non-musician. Six experiments were designed to explore the perceptual basis of emotional judgments in music. In each experiment, the same set of 32 excerpts taken from the classical repertoire and intended to convey a happy or sad tone were presented under various transformations and with different task demands. In Expts. 1 to 3, subjects were required to judge on a 10-point scale whether the excerpts were happy or sad. Altogether the results show that emotional judgments are (a) highly consistent across subjects and resistant to brain damage; (b) determined by musical structure (mode and tempo); and (c) immediate. Experiments 4 to 6 were designed to assess whether emotional and non-emotional judgments reflect the operations of a single perceptual analysis system. To this aim, we searched for evidence of dissociation in our brain-damaged patient, I.R., by using tasks that do not require emotional interpretation. These non-emotional tasks were a `same-different' classification task (Expt. 4), error detection tasks (Expt. 5A,B) and a change monitoring task (Expt. 6). I.R. was impaired in these non-emotional tasks except when the change affected the mode and the tempo of the excerpt, in which case I.R. performed close to normal. The results are discussed in relation to the possibility that emotional and non-emotional judgments are the products of distinct pathways.

Introduction

Music is often characterized as the language of emotions. Ironically, the vast majority of experimental studies has been devoted to the study of musical structure as a non-verbal language, rarely as an emotional language. Part of this situation can be attributed to the widely held belief that emotional interpretation of music is a highly personal and variable experience, hence escaping scientific examination. A fortiori, emotional interpretation of music is not conceived as the product of a neuro-anatomical arrangement that can be shared by most members of a given musical culture. The present study shows that this view is misleading.

We present the case of a woman, I.R., who suffers from a severe loss of music recognition and expressive abilities, and yet retains the capacity to appreciate music. I.R. is a right-handed 40-year-old woman with 10 years of formal education. She sustained, 10 years prior to the present study, successive brain surgeries for the clipping of mirror aneurysms on each middle cerebral artery. As a result, sequelar lesions were found in both temporal lobes, extending bilaterally to frontal areas. At the time of testing, I.R.'s intellectual and memory abilities corresponded to a normal level for her level of education and age. Speech comprehension and expression were also normal except for a mild articulatory deficit. Contrasting with normal level of mental functioning, I.R. experiences persistent difficulties with music. She can no longer recognize melodies that were once highly familiar to her; she is unable to discriminate musical sequences. She can no longer sing more than a single pitch, even though she used to sing before her brain accident. Therefore, her musical abilities were found to be severely impaired while her speech and intellectual functions were spared. This pattern corresponds to a clear-cut case of amusia without aphasia in neuropsychological terms (Peretz et al., 1997).

Despite I.R.'s clear deficit in music, of which she is fully aware, she claims that she still enjoys music. This is a non-trivial claim. How can someone derive a proper emotional interpretation of music without an adequate structural analysis of it? This is the question experimentally addressed in the present study. To our knowledge, no prior study has assessed emotional treatment of music in brain-damaged populations. Consequently, no dissociation between emotional and structural judgments has ever been envisaged. The present study constitutes a first exploration in this vast domain of music emotion and cognition.

First, we will present the neuropsychological background for the present study. Then, we will present each experimental investigation in the order in which the patient and her matched control subjects were evaluated. The rationale for following the same experimental paths (except for Expt. 5B which took place a year after completion of the study) are that (1) the same musical stimuli were used across experiments, thus becoming progressively more familiar to the subjects as we proceed, and (2) the readers will get a share of the excitement and bewilderment that we experienced while conducting the present study.

Section snippets

Neurology

I.R. is a right-handed woman in her early forties who suffered bilateral cerebral damage caused by the repair of cerebral aneurysms located on the left and right middle cerebral arteries. At the time of testing, 10 years after the brain surgeries, CT scans showed that in the left hemisphere, most of the superior temporal gyrus was damaged; only a small portion of the posterior superior temporal gyrus was spared. The hypodensity extended anteriorly into the frontal operculum, medially into most

Material and apparatus

The same set of 32 musical selections (presented in Appendix A) was used throughout the experiments. All excerpts were instrumental in that they were not originally sung with lyrics; they were drawn from the corpus of Western music and were thus composed for other purposes than experimentation. The excerpts were chosen from the classic literature because it was considered important to use musical material that is sufficiently complex and engaging to guarantee its processing as a meaningful

General discussion

The present study grew out of the observation of a remarkable sparing of emotional responses to music in the context of severe deficits in processing music as a result of brain damage. To understand the origin of this neuropsychological dissociation, a set of six experiments was designed to explore the perceptual basis of emotional judgments in music. In doing so, a number of findings were obtained. Some concern the functioning of a normal brain, since several experimental situations in the

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to I.R. for her active and continuing cooperation. Excerpts of the present work were presented in the series `Music and the Mind' and broadcast on I.T.V. (U.K.) in May 1996. We are grateful to Julie Ayotte for testing control students. We particularly wish to acknowledge the insightful and constructive comments made by Carol Krumhansl, Emannuel Bigand, Carolyn Drake and an anonymous reviewer on a previous draft of this paper. The research was supported by a grant from the

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