Emotional Responses During Music Listening - Guide to Brain-Computer Music Interfacing - page 102

Music processing in the brain involves different brain areas and several studies
attempted to investigate brain activity in relation to emotion during music listening
through EEG signals. Furthermore, a growing interest has been recently developed
to build brain-computer music interfaces (BCMI) that use real-time brain signals to
communicate with the environment. Recent research in BCMI aims at the ability to
access the user ' s brain activity to gain insight into the user ' s emotional state.

Deeper understanding of the in uence of the emotional state on brain activity

patterns can allow the BCMI to adapt its recognition algorithms, so that the
intention of the user is correctly interpreted in spite of deviations caused by the
subject

s emotional state. Furthermore, the ability to recognize emotions can be
used to provide the user with more ways of controlling the BCMI through affective
modulation. In Sect. 6.7 , the issues and challenges of assessing different human
emotions through EEG are presented and discussed.
Finally, Sect. 6.8 provides an overview of the chapter and focuses on problems
that remain to be addressed in future research.

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6.2 Models of Musical Emotions

The first problem raised in the research of music emotion is a model of emotions.
There are different approaches as to how emotions can be conceptualized and
described. The two main approaches that have strongly in

uenced research in the
area are the discrete or categorical approach and the dimensional approach.

6.2.1 Discrete Emotion Models

According to the discrete model, all emotions can be derived from a limited number
of basic universal emotions such as fear, anger, disgust, sadness, and happiness
(Ekman 1992a , b , 1999 ; Panksepp 1998 ). Each emotion is independent of the others
in its behavioral, psychological, and physiological manifestation, and each arises
from activation of independent neural systems. In studies investigating music and
emotion, the discrete model has been modi ed to better represent the emotions

induced by music. Emotions such as disgust are rarely expressed by music and
therefore have been replaced by tenderness, which is more suitable in the context of
music (Balkwill and Thompson 1999 ; Gabrielsson and Juslin 1996 ). Although the
number of basic emotions has been a matter of debate, the discrete model has
proven robust against cross-cultural, neural and physiological studies (Panksepp
1992 ). The discrete model has found so far applications in music psychological
(Dalla Bella et al. 2001 ), physiological (Baumgartner et al. 2006 ), and neurological
studies (Peretz et al. 1998 ).
Basic emotions have been investigated by exploring peripheral physiological
responses, and it was assumed that each basic emotion is associated with a speci c

physiological pattern. It was found, however, that basic emotions are not associated