Electrophysiological Correlates of Vocal Emotional Processing in Musicians and Non-Musicians

Abstract

Musicians outperform non-musicians in vocal emotion recognition, but the underlying mechanisms are still debated. Behavioral measures highlight the importance of auditory sensitivity towards emotional voice cues. However, it remains unclear whether and how this group difference is reflected at the brain level. Here, we compared event-related potentials (ERPs) to acoustically manipulated voices between musicians (n = 39) and non-musicians (n = 39). We used parameter-specific voice morphing to create and present vocal stimuli that conveyed happiness, fear, pleasure, or sadness, either in all acoustic cues or selectively in either pitch contour (F0) or timbre. Although the fronto-central P200 (150-250 ms) and N400 (300-500 ms) components were modulated by pitch and timbre, differences between musicians and non-musicians appeared only for a centro-parietal late positive potential (500-1000 ms). Thus, this study does not support an early auditory specialization in musicians but suggests instead that musicality affects the manner in which listeners use acoustic voice cues during later, controlled aspects of emotion evaluation.

Keywords: electrophysiological correlates; fundamental frequency (F0); musicality; parameter-specific voice morphing; timbre; vocal emotion perception.

Figure 1

Illustration of the voice averaging process.

Figure 2

Morphing matrix for stimuli with averaged voices as reference.

Figure 3

Fronto-central ERPs separately for emotion and morph type averaged across nine channels (details in Figure 4B). Yellow shaded areas illustrate the analysis window of the P200 (150 to 250 ms) and the N400 (300 to 500 ms).

Figure 4

(A) Centro-parietal ERPs of non-musicians for each morph type separately. (B) EEG channel locations with the fronto-central cluster in yellow and the centro-parietal cluster in light blue. Note that both clusters overlap at C1, Cz, and C2, marked in light green. (C) Centro-parietal ERPs of musicians for each emotion and morph type separately. Light-blue shaded areas illustrate the analysis window of the LPP (500 to 1000 ms).