Biology subjects

Liuni, M.

Publications and source records attributed to Liuni, M..

4 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2023

The implicit influence of pitch contours and emotional timbre on P300 components in an own-name oddball paradigm

ObjectivePrevious evidence has suggested that paralinguistic features of speech stimuli may influence the characteristics of P300 components when used in clinical evaluation of consciousness. However, it remains unknown what exact acoustic components of speech are influential in such tasks, and whether they are capable of interacting with attentional deployment (as indexed by P300) in an implicit manner. MethodTo study this question, we adapted here an auditory oddball-paradigm used in clinical practice (the "own-name" paradigm), and tested whether systematic transformations of pitch contours (i.e. rising or falling intonation) and emotional timbre (i.e. smiling or rough voices) on the participants names influenced P300 responses in 24 healthy participants. ResultsP300 responses to rising pitch contours were smaller than to falling pitch contours, possibly reflecting an interference of the rising contours with participant attention in the deviant-counting task. No such difference was observed with emotional timbre variations. Conclusion and SignificanceThese results suggest that the cognitive resources involved in pitch contour processing overlap more strongly than timbre with the resources required to count own-name deviants, and that rising pitch contours should be tested prospectively as a way to increase the saliency of consciousness evaluation in unconscious patients.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2020

Sound context modulates perceived vocal emotion

Many animal vocalizations contain nonlinear acoustic phenomena as a consequence of physiological arousal. In humans, nonlinear features are processed early in the auditory system, and are used to efficiently detect alarm calls and other urgent signals. Yet, high-level emotional and semantic contextual factors likely guide the perception and evaluation of roughness features in vocal sounds. Here we examined the relationship between perceived vocal arousal and auditory context. We presented listeners with nonverbal vocalizations (yells of a single vowel) at varying levels of portrayed vocal arousal, in two musical contexts (clean guitar, distorted guitar) and one non-musical context (modulated noise). As predicted, vocalizations with higher levels of portrayed vocal arousal were judged as more negative and more emotionally aroused than the same voices produced with low vocal arousal. Moreover, both the perceived valence and emotional arousal of vocalizations were significantly affected by both musical and non-musical contexts. These results show the importance of auditory context in judging emotional arousal and valence in voices and music, and suggest that nonlinear features in music are processed similarly to communicative vocal signals.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2019

Enjoy The Violence: Is appreciation for extreme music the result of cognitive control over the threat response system?

Traditional neurobiological theories of musical emotions explain well why extreme music such as punk, hardcore or metal, whose vocal and instrumental characteristics share much similarity with acoustic threat signals, should evoke unpleasant feelings for a large proportion of listeners. Why it doesnt for metal music fans, however, remains a theoretical challenge: metal fans may differ from non-fans in how they process acoustic threat signals at the sub-cortical level, showing deactivated or reconditioned responses that differ from controls. Alternatively, it is also possible that appreciation for metal depends on the inhibition by cortical circuits of a normal low-order response to auditory threat. In a series of three experiments, we show here that, at a sensory level, metal fans actually react equally negatively, equally fast and even more accurately to cues of auditory threat in vocal and instrumental contexts than non-fans. Conversely, cognitive load somewhat appears to reduce fans appreciation of metal to the level reported by non-fans. Taken together, these results are not compatible with the idea that extreme music lovers do so because of a different low-level response to threat, but rather, highlight a critical contribution of higher-order cognition to the aesthetic experience. These results are discussed in the light of recent higher-order theories of emotional consciousness, which we argue should be generalized to the emotional experience of music across musical genres.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2018

CLEESE: An open-source audio-transformation toolbox for data-driven experiments in speech and music cognition

Over the past few years, the field of visual social cognition and face processing has been dramatically impacted by a series of data-driven studies employing computer-graphics tools to synthesize arbitrary meaningful facial expressions. In the auditory modality, reverse correlation is traditionally used to characterize sensory processing at the level of spectral or spectro-temporal stimulus properties, but not higher-level cognitive processing of e.g. words, sentences or music, by lack of tools able to manipulate the stimulus dimensions that are relevant for these processes. Here, we present an open-source audio-transformation toolbox, called CLEESE, able to systematically randomize the prosody/melody of existing speech and music recordings. CLEESE works by cutting recordings in small successive time segments (e.g. every successive 100 milliseconds in a spoken utterance), and applying a random parametric transformation of each segments pitch, duration or amplitude, using a new Python-language implementation of the phase-vocoder digital audio technique. We present here two applications of the tool to generate stimuli for studying intonation processing of interrogative vs declarative speech, and rhythm processing of sung melodies.

neuroscience↗