Abstract:

The event-related potential (ERP) technique was used to investigate whether there are different neural responses to musical emotion when the same melodies are presented in the voice and instrumental timbre such as the violin. With a crossmodal affective priming paradigm, target faces were primed by affectively congruent or incongruent vocal and instrumental music. Participants were asked to judge whether the prime-target pair was affectively congruent or incongruent. The results revealed a larger late positive component (LPC) at the time window of 473~677 ms in response to affectively incongruent versus congruent trials in the vocal version, whereas a larger N400 effect at the time window of 281~471 ms was observed in the instrumental version. These results indicate differential patterns of neurophysiological responses to emotion processing of vocal and instrumental music.

Key words: vocal music, instrumental music, emotion processing, N400, LPC