Aesthetic appreciation of music: Evidence from behavioral and electrophysiological studies.
-
1
Institute of Psychology I, University of Leipzig, Germany
Recent years have seen an increase of interest in the neurocognition of aesthetic appreciation. In a series of studies, we have investigated intentional and spontaneous evaluation of musical stimuli with regard to concepts relevant for aesthetics. This talk will introduce a framework for the psychological study of aesthetic processing. One study augments prior findings of the influence of music expertise on music processing by investigating electrophysiological responses of music experts and laymen to musical chord sequences under two different task instructions. 16 music experts and 16 music laymen judged the aesthetic value (aesthetic task) as well as the harmonic correctness (correctness task) of chord sequences. The sequences consisted of five chords with the ending chord sounding either congruous, incongruous or mildly incongruous in relation to the harmonic context established by the preceding four chords. ERP data indicate differences in the processing of aesthetic and descriptive aspects of music, i.e., a late and widespread positivity was observed that was significantly larger for aesthetic compared to correctness judgements. There was a slight tendency for this difference to be larger for laymen than for experts. Additionally, established ERP effects reflecting the processing of harmonic rule violation were investigated. Here, group differences were observed in the processing of the mildly incongruent chords. Furthermore, experts showed larger early brain responses to the beginning of the whole chord sequence compared with laymen. Given the present results, a strong influence of expertise on aesthetic processing of music could not be revealed. However, independent of task demand, experts and laymen differed in their early processing of musical sounds. Using these as well as additional results, the talk will attempt to integrate findings on the aesthetic appreciation of musical stimuli with findings from other modalities.
Conference:
Tuning the Brain for Music, Helsinki, Finland, 5 Feb - 6 Feb, 2009.
Presentation Type:
Oral Presentation
Topic:
Session Talks
Citation:
Jacobsen
T
(2009). Aesthetic appreciation of music: Evidence from behavioral and electrophysiological studies..
Conference Abstract:
Tuning the Brain for Music.
doi: 10.3389/conf.neuro.09.2009.02.015
Copyright:
The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers.
They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters.
The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated.
Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed.
For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions.
Received:
23 Jan 2009;
Published Online:
23 Jan 2009.
*
Correspondence:
Thomas Jacobsen, Institute of Psychology I, University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany, jacobsen@uni-leipzig.de