Cognitive Neural Mechanism Underlying Music Training Experience Affecting Music Emotion And Cross-modality Pitch Matching Perception

Music is one of the prominent means of auditory communication of emotions,and having pitch perception ability is the basis for human beings to feel music emotion.While humans perceive emotions and pitch automatically,those ability does not necessarily have the same development in all individuals.Previous studies using artificial experimental stimuli such as timbre and rhythm have found that people with long-term musical training have stronger ability to perceive music emotions.However,the neural activities difference induced by music emotion between people with long-term musical and ordinary people has not been systematically investigated using standardized emotional nature music.As for pitch perception,in addition to the auditory input mode concerned by most previous studies,visual notes are also an important input mode,while the difference between musicians and ordinary people in pitch perception has not been studied in audiovisual cross-modality tasks.In order to solve the above problems,two EEG experiments were carried out in this study.In Experiment 1,we recruited 45 subjects totally,and they were divided into musician group（n = 27）and non-musician group（n = 28）according to the long-term musical training experience.They participated a note（visual）-pure tone（auditory）matching task with three different mismatch conditions,and different mismatch conditions correspond to three difficulty levels.We found musician group performed significantly better than non-musician group in higher difficulty level and had significantly stronger strength of N400 component than non-musician group which means musician group were more sensitive to audiovisual match and mismatch.In Experiment 2,we also recruited musician group（n = 23）and non-musician group（n = 24）subjects to participate an auditory task experiment using natural music with standardized emotional valence.And the inter-subject correlation（ISC）analysis method is used here to uncover the neural mechanisms behind the processing of complex audio stimuli,and to understand how the brain works in real-life situations.This result showed that the neural oscillation patterns of music emotion perception in the two groups were different.The neural oscillation activity induced by music emotion in musician group mainly appears in alpha band,while it appears in Delta,theta,alpha and gamma bands for non-musician group,indicating that musical training experience affects the neural oscillation mode of people’s perception of music emotion.Taken together,this study explored the effect of musical training on brain functional plasticity in two aspects: cognitive matching and emotional perception.We verified that people with long-term musical training have stronger cross-modality pitch perception ability too.Combined with the results that musicians are more sensitive to conflict detection,it shows that musical training can improve people’s cross-modality matching ability by improving people’s sensitivity to conflict detection.On the other hand,we found that the distribution of synchronous neural oscillatory activity evoked by musical emotion in the musician group was different from that in the non-musician group,which indicating musical training may affect the neural oscillation pattern of musical emotion perception.The present findings provide new insights regarding the cortical mechanisms subtending cross-modality matching and the processing of emotional information among individuals in an ecological context.It has certain enlightenment significance for further exploring the impact of music training on brain functional plasticity.