Elvira Brattico – Automatic processing of musical emotions in the brain

Ircam, 9th June 2016

Speaker: Elvira Brattico (Aarhus University)

Elvira Brattico (PhD in Psychology, University of Helsinki, 2007) is Professor of Neuroscience, Music and Aesthetics at the Center for Music in the Brain (MIB), Aarhus University and Royal Academy of Music, Aarhus/Aalborg, Denmark. She is a pioneer in applying computational music information retrieval methods to neurophysiological and neuroimaging methods to solve questions concerning music processing, such as how the brain represents musical features and why we enjoy music. Prof.Brattico has published more than 100 papers, of which 68 appear in peer-reviewed international journals or conference proceedings.

Title: Automatic processing of musical emotions in the brain

Several features of the auditory environment are analysed and predicted even before the intervention of attention in an automatic and irrepressible way in order to facilitate response to salient and potentially dangerous events. Music capitalises on variations of “low-level” spectrotemporal features common to other auditory signals, and is also characterised by “high-level” sound schemata based on conventional agreement between members of a certain musical culture, which need to be learned via acculturation. In this talk I will review my recent neurophysiological and neuroimaging studies on the attentional resources required for encoding and predicting “low-“ vs. “high-level” sound features in isolation or in a realistic music context.