Modelling emotions in music and the brain

How do abstract sounds such as music evoke intense emotions?

Philosophers and scientists have been trying to answer this question from different perspectives. Most recent approaches started to investigate whether what human brains extract from music is similar to what is captured by computational models. This may allow us to understand the nature of the information that evokes emotions. Seung-Goo Kim reviews parallel advances in human neuroscience (how we can model brain activity) and musical science (how we can model music) in a paper just published in Frontiers in Neuroscience. Using in-depth mathematical explanations, the article guides readers through the various types of models in the interdisciplinary field of the neuroscience of music. The review is especially intended to aid researchers who are interested in going beyond experimentally simplified sounds, to modelling neural responses to complex real-world music that can evoke strong emotions.

Publication

Kim, S-G (2022). On the encoding of natural music in computational models and human brains. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 16, 928841. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2022.928841