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BACKGROUND: It is known that music influences gait parameters in Parkinson's disease (PD). However, it remains unclear whether this effect is merely due to temporal aspects of music (rhythm and tempo) or other musical parameters.OBJECTIVE: To examine the influence of pleasant and unpleasant music on spatiotemporal gait parameters in PD, while controlling for rhythmic aspects of the musical signal.METHODS: We measured spatiotemporal gait parameters of 18 patients suffering from mild PD (50%men, mean±SD age of 64±6 years; mean disease duration of 6±5 years; mean Unified PD Rating scale [UPDRS] motor score of 15±7) who listened to eight different pieces of music. Music pieces varied in harmonic consonance/dissonance to create the experience of pleasant/unpleasant feelings. To measure gait parameters, we used an established analysis of spatiotemporal gait, which consists of a walkway containing pressure-receptive sensors (GAITRite®). Repeated measures analyses of variance were used to evaluate effects of auditory stimuli. In addition, linear regression was used to evaluate effects of valence on gait.RESULTS: Sensory dissonance modulated spatiotemporal and spatial gait parameters, namely velocity and stride length, while temporal gait parameters (cadence, swing duration) were not affected. In contrast, valence in music as perceived by patients was not associated with gait parameters. Motor and musical abilities did not relevantly influence the modulation of gait by auditory stimuli.CONCLUSION: Our observations suggest that dissonant music negatively affects particularly spatial gait parameters in PD by yet unknown mechanisms, but putatively through increased cognitive interference reducing attention in auditory cueing.

Music is organised both spectrally and temporally, determining musical structures such as musical scale, harmony, and sequential rules in chord progressions. A number of human neuroimaging studies investigated neural processes associated with emotional responses to music investigating the influence of musical valence (pleasantness/unpleasantness) comparing the response to music and unpleasantly manipulated counterparts where harmony and sequential rules were varied. Interactions between the previously applied alterations to harmony and sequential rules of the music in terms of emotional experience and corresponding neural activities have not been systematically studied although such interactions are at the core of how music affects the listener. The current study investigates the interaction between such alterations in harmony and sequential rules by using data sets from two functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments. While replicating the previous findings, we found a significant interaction between the spectral and temporal alterations in the fronto-limbic system, including the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), nucleus accumbens, caudate nucleus, and putamen. We further revealed that the functional connectivity between the vmPFC and the right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) was reduced when listening to excerpts with alterations in both domains compared to the original music. As it has been suggested that the vmPFC operates as a pivotal point that mediates between the limbic system and the frontal cortex in reward-related processing, we propose that this fronto-limbic interaction might be related to the involvement of cognitive processes in the emotional appreciation of music.

Accurate perception of the emotional content of vocalisations is essential for successful social communication and interaction. However, it is not clear whether our ability to perceive emotional cues from vocal signals is specific to human signals, or can be applied to other species’ vocalisations. Here, we address this issue by evaluating the perception and neural response to affective vocalisations from different primate species (humans, chimpanzees and macaques). We found that the ability of human participants to discriminate emotional valence varied as a function of phylogenetic distance between species. Participants were most accurate at discriminating the emotional valence of human vocalisations, followed by chimpanzee vocalisations. They were, however, unable to accurately discriminate the valence of macaque vocalisations. Next, we used fMRI to compare human brain responses to human, chimpanzee and macaque vocalisations. We found that regions in the superior temporal lobe that are closely associated with the perception of complex auditory signals, showed a graded response to affective vocalisations from different species with the largest response to human vocalisations, an intermediate response to chimpanzees, and the smallest response to macaques. Together, these results suggest that neural correlates of differences in the perception of different primate affective vocalisations are found in auditory regions of the human brain and correspond to the phylogenetic distances between the species.

Musical excerpts have been shown to have the capacity to prime the processing of target words and vice versa, strongly suggesting that music can convey concepts. However, to date no study has investigated an influence of musical semantics on novel word acquisition, thus corroborating evidence for a similarity of underlying semantic processing of music and words behaviourally. The current study investigates whether semantic content of music can assist the acquisition of novel words. Forty novel words and their German translation were visually presented to 26 participants accompanied by either semantically congruent or incongruent music. Semantic congruence between music and words was expected to increase performance in the subsequent forced-choice recognition test. Participants performed significantly better on the retention of novel words presented with semantically congruent music compared to those presented with semantically incongruent music. This provides first evidence that semantic "enrichment" by music during novel word learning can augment novel word acquisition. This finding may lead to novel approaches in foreign language acquisition and language rehabilitation, and further strongly supports the concept that music has a strong capacity to iconically convey meaning.

Ventral striatal activity has been previously shown to correspond well to reward value mediated by music. Here, we investigate the dynamic brain response to music and manipulated counterparts using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Counterparts of musical excerpts were produced by either manipulating the consonance/dissonance of the musical fragments or playing them backwards (or both). Results show a greater involvement of the ventral striatum/nucleus accumbens both when contrasting listening to music that is perceived as pleasant and listening to a manipulated version perceived as unpleasant (backward dissonant), as well as in a parametric analysis for increasing pleasantness. Notably, both analyses yielded a ventral striatal response that was strongest during an early phase of stimulus presentation. A hippocampal response to the musical stimuli was also observed, and was largely mediated by processing differences between listening to forward and backward music. This hippocampal involvement was again strongest during the early response to the music. Auditory cortex activity was more strongly evoked by the original (pleasant) music compared to its manipulated counterparts, but did not display a similar decline of activation over time as subcortical activity. These findings rather suggest that the ventral striatal/nucleus accumbens response during music listening is strongest in the first seconds and then declines.

Harmony is one of the most fundamental elements of music that evokes emotional response. The inferior colliculus (IC) has been known to detect poor agreement of harmonics of sound, that is, dissonance. Electrophysiological evidence has implicated a relationship between a sustained auditory response mainly from the brainstem and unpleasant emotion induced by dissonant harmony. Interestingly, an individual’s dislike of dissonant harmony of an individual correlated with a reduced sustained auditory response. In the current paper, we report novel evidence based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) for such a relationship between individual variability in dislike of dissonance and the IC activation. Furthermore, for the first time, we show how dissonant harmony modulates functional connectivity of the IC and its association with behaviourally reported unpleasantness. The current findings support important contributions of low level auditory processing and corticofugal interaction in musical harmony preference.

This study investigates neural correlates of music-evoked fear and joy with fMRI. Studies on neural correlates of music-evoked fear are scant, and there are only a few studies on neural correlates of joy in general. Eighteen individuals listened to excerpts of fear-evoking, joy-evoking, as well as neutral music and rated their own emotional state in terms of valence, arousal, fear, and joy. Results show that BOLD signal intensity increased during joy, and decreased during fear (compared to the neutral condition) in bilateral auditory cortex (AC) and bilateral superficial amygdala (SF). In the right primary somatosensory cortex (area 3b) BOLD signals increased during exposure to fear-evoking music. While emotion-specific activity in AC increased with increasing duration of each trial, SF responded phasically in the beginning of the stimulus, and then SF activity declined. Psychophysiological Interaction (PPI) analysis revealed extensive emotion-specific functional connectivity of AC with insula, cingulate cortex, as well as with visual, and parietal attentional structures. These findings show that the auditory cortex functions as a central hub of an affective-attentional network that is more extensive than previously believed. PPI analyses also showed functional connectivity of SF with AC during the joy condition, taken to reflect that SF is sensitive to social signals with positive valence. During fear music, SF showed functional connectivity with visual cortex and area 7 of the superior parietal lobule, taken to reflect increased visual alertness and an involuntary shift of attention during the perception of auditory signals of danger.

Summary It has long been debated which aspects of music perception are universal and which are developed only after exposure to a specific musical culture [1–5]. Here, we report a crosscultural study with participants from a native African population (Mafa) and Western participants, with both groups being naive to the music of the other respective culture. Experiment 1 investigated the ability to recognize three basic emotions (happy, sad, scared/fearful) expressed in Western music. Results show that the Mafas recognized happy, sad, and scared/fearful Western music excerpts above chance, indicating that the expression of these basic emotions in Western music can be recognized universally. Experiment 2 examined how a spectral manipulation of original, naturalistic music affects the perceived pleasantness of music in Western as well as in Mafa listeners. The spectral manipulation modified, among other factors, the sensory dissonance of the music. The data show that both groups preferred original Western music and also original Mafa music over their spectrally manipulated versions. It is likely that the sensory dissonance produced by the spectral manipulation was at least partly responsible for this effect, suggesting that consonance and permanent sensory dissonance universally influence the perceived pleasantness of music.

Strict adherence to highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) is necessary for successful suppression of HIV replication. A large number of individuals are not adherent, however, and the reasons for non-adherence are varied and complex. We utilized cluster analyses to identify subgroups of adherers in a sample of 222 HIV positive individuals whose HAART use was electronically monitored. Five distinct subgroups were identified, with characteristic variations across the week and over the course of the 4-week study. Additional comparisons of demographic and behavioral variables found the worst adherers to have higher rates of substance use, and that a group with higher rates of cognitive impairment had a consistent drop in adherence during the weekends. In addition, the group with the best adherence had more individuals over the age of 50 years. The results of the current study indicate that distinct subgroups of adherers may exist, and suggest that interventions designed to improve adherence can be designed to accommodate this variability in behavior.

Given a possible effect of estrogen on the pleasure-mediating dopaminergic system, musical appreciation in participants whose estrogen levels are naturally elevated during the oral contraceptive cycle and pregnancy has been investigated (n = 32, 15 pregnant, 17 nonpregnant; mean age 27.2). Results show more pronounced blood pressure responses to music in pregnant women. However, estrogen level differences during different phases of oral contraceptive intake did not have any effect, indicating that the observed changes were not related to estrogen. Effects of music on blood pressure were independent of valence, and dissonance elicited the greatest drop in blood pressure. Thus, the enhanced physiological response in pregnant women probably does not reflect a protective mechanism to avoid unpleasantness. Instead, this enhanced response is discussed in terms of a facilitation of prenatal conditioning to acoustical (musical) stimuli.

While watching movies, the brain integrates the visual information and the musical soundtrack into a coherent percept. Multisensory integration can lead to emotion elicitation on which soundtrack valences may have a modulatory impact. Here, dynamic kissing scenes from romantic comedies were presented to 22 participants (13 females) during functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning. The kissing scenes were either accompanied by happy music, sad music or no music. Evidence from cross-modal studies motivated a predefined three-region network for multisensory integration of emotion, consisting of fusiform gyrus (FG), amygdala (AMY) and anterior superior temporal gyrus (aSTG). The interactions in this network were investigated using dynamic causal models of effective connectivity. This revealed bilinear modulations by happy and sad music with suppression effects on the connectivity from FG and AMY to aSTG. Non-linear dynamic causal modeling showed a suppressive gating effect of aSTG on fusiform–amygdalar connectivity. In conclusion, fusiform to amygdala coupling strength is modulated via feedback through aSTG as region for multisensory integration of emotional material. This mechanism was emotion-specific and more pronounced for sad music. Therefore, soundtrack valences may modulate emotion elicitation in movies by differentially changing preprocessed visual information to the amygdala.

Music is known to be capable of reducing perceived exertion during strenuous physical activity. The current interpretation of this modulating effect of music is that music may be perceived as a diversion from unpleasant proprioceptive sensations that go along with exhaustion. Here we investigated the effects of music on perceived exertion during a physically strenuous task, varying musical agency, a task that relies on the experience of body proprioception, rather than simply diverting from it. For this we measured psychologically indicated exertion during physical workout with and without musical agency while simultaneously acquiring metabolic values with spirometry. Results showed that musical agency significantly decreased perceived exertion during workout, indicating that musical agency may actually facilitate physically strenuous activities. This indicates that the positive effect of music on perceived exertion cannot always be explained by an effect of diversion from proprioceptive feedback. Furthermore, this finding suggests that the down-modulating effect of musical agency on perceived exertion may be a previously unacknowledged driving force for the development of music in humans: making music makes strenuous physical activities less exhausting.

Helmholtz himself speculated about a role of the cochlea in the perception of musical dissonance. Here we indirectly investigated this issue, assessing the valence judgment of musical stimuli with variable consonance/dissonance and presented diotically (exactly the same dissonant signal was presented to both ears) or dichotically (a consonant signal was presented to each ear - both consonant signals were rhythmically identical but differed by a semitone in pitch). Differences in brain organisation underlying inter-subject differences in the percept of dichotically presented dissonance were determined with voxel-based morphometry. Behavioral results showed that diotic dissonant stimuli were perceived as more unpleasant than dichotically presented dissonance, indicating that interactions within the cochlea modulated the valence percept during dissonance. However, the behavioral data also suggested that the dissonance percept did not depend crucially on the cochlea, but also occurred as a result of binaural integration when listening to dichotic dissonance. These results also showed substantial between-participant variations in the valence response to dichotic dissonance. These differences were in a voxel-based morphometry analysis related to differences in gray matter density in the inferior colliculus, which strongly substantiated a key role of the inferior colliculus in consonance/dissonance representation in humans.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in auditory experiments is a challenge, because the scanning procedure produces considerable noise that can interfere with the auditory paradigm. The noise might either mask the auditory material presented, or interfere with stimuli designed to evoke emotions because it sounds loud and rather unpleasant. Therefore, scanning paradigms that allow interleaved auditory stimulation and image acquisition appear to be advantageous. The sparse temporal sampling (STS) technique uses a very long repetition time in order to achieve a stimulus presentation in the absence of scanner noise. Although only relatively few volumes are acquired for the resulting data sets, there have been recent studies where this method has furthered remarkable results. A new development is the interleaved silent steady state (ISSS) technique. Compared with STS, this method is capable of acquiring several volumes in the time frame between the auditory trials (while the magnetization is kept in a steady state during stimulus presentation). In order to draw conclusions about the optimum fMRI procedure with auditory stimulation, different echo-planar imaging (EPI) acquisition schemes were compared: Continuous scanning, STS, and ISSS. The total acquisition time of each sequence was adjusted to about 12.5 min. The results indicate that the ISSS approach exhibits the highest sensitivity in detecting subtle activity in sub-cortical brain regions.

Numerous earlier studies have investigated the cognitive processing of musical syntax with regular and irregular chord sequences. However, irregular sequences may also be perceived as unexpected, and therefore have a diierent emotional valence than regular sequences. We provide behavioral data showing that irregular chord functions presented in chord sequence paradigms are perceived as less pleasant than regular sequences. A reanalysis of functional MRI data showed increased blood oxygen leveldependent signal changes bilaterally in the amygdala in response to music-syntactically irregular (compared with regular) chord functions.The combined data indicate that music-syntactically irregular events elicit brain activity related to emotional processes, and that, in addition to intensely pleasurable music or highly unpleasant music, single chord functions can also modulate amygdala activity. NeuroReport 19:1815^1819 � c 2008 Wolters Kluwer Health | Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.

This study investigates the functional architecture of working memory (WM) for verbal and tonal information during rehearsal and articulatory suppression. Participants were presented with strings of four sung syllables with the task to remember either the pitches (tonal information) or the syllables (verbal information). Rehearsal of verbal, as well as of tonal information activated a network comprising ventrolateral premotor cortex (encroaching Broca's area), dorsal premotor cortex, the planum temporale, inferior parietal lobe, the anterior insula, subcortical structures (basal ganglia and thalamus), as well as the cerebellum. The topography of activations was virtually identical for the rehearsal of syllables and pitches, showing a remarkable overlap of the WM components for the rehearsal of verbal and tonal information. When the WM task was performed under articulatory suppression, activations in those areas decreased, while additional activations arose in anterior prefrontal areas. These prefrontal areas might contain additional storage components of verbal and tonal WM that are activated when auditory information cannot be rehearsed. As in the rehearsal conditions, the topography of activations under articulatory suppression was nearly identical for the verbal as compared to the tonal task. Results indicate that both the rehearsal of verbal and tonal information, as well as storage of verbal and tonal information relies on strongly overlapping neuronal networks. These networks appear to partly consist of sensorimotor‐related circuits which provide resources for the representation and maintenance of information, and which are remarkably similar for the production of speech and song. Hum Brain Mapp, 2009. © 2008 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.

The present study used pleasant and unpleasant music to evoke emotion and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to determine neural correlates of emotion processing. Unpleasant (permanently dissonant) music contrasted with pleasant (consonant) music showed activations of amygdala, hippocampus, parahippocampal gyrus, and temporal poles. These structures have previously been implicated in the emotional processing of stimuli with (negative) emotional valence; the present data show that a cerebral network comprising these structures can be activated during the perception of auditory (musical) information. Pleasant (contrasted to unpleasant) music showed activations of the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG, inferior Brodmann's area (BA) 44, BA 45, and BA 46), the anterior superior insula, the ventral striatum, Heschl's gyrus, and the Rolandic operculum. IFG activations appear to reflect processes of music–syntactic analysis and working memory operations. Activations of Rolandic opercular areas possibly reflect the activation of mirror‐function mechanisms during the perception of the pleasant tunes. Rolandic operculum, anterior superior insula, and ventral striatum may form a motor‐related circuitry that serves the formation of (premotor) representations for vocal sound production during the perception of pleasant auditory information. In all of the mentioned structures, except the hippocampus, activations increased over time during the presentation of the musical stimuli, indicating that the effects of emotion processing have temporal dynamics; the temporal dynamics of emotion have so far mainly been neglected in the functional imaging literature. Hum Brain Mapp 2005. © 2005 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.