Biology subjects

Proverbio, A. M.

Publications and source records attributed to Proverbio, A. M..

6 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Motor Resonance of Musical Emotion: A Machine Learning Approach to EEG Decoding During Expressive Music Performance

Understanding the neural dynamics underlying expressive musical performance remains a major challenge at the intersection of neuroscience, music cognition, and computational modeling. While EEG studies of emotion have largely focused on passive exposure to affective stimuli, comparatively little research has examined oscillatory brain activity during active musical expression. The present single-subject study investigated whether band-limited EEG activity recorded during expressive piano performance by a professional concert pianist contains sufficient discriminative structure to support supervised multi-class classification of musically defined emotional categories. MethodsEEG was recorded from 128 scalp sites while a professional concert pianist performed emotionally characterized excerpts from Bach, Beethoven, and Chopin in a continuous naturalistic session. Musical excerpts had been previously categorized and perceptually validated according to emotional valence, tempo, energy/arousal, and tonal structure. From the continuous EEG recording, 180 non-overlapping 2-second artifact-free segments were extracted, yielding 30 segments for each emotional category. Mean spectral power was computed within theta (3.5-7.5 Hz), alpha (7.5-12.5 Hz), and high-beta (24-30 Hz) frequency bands across selected centro-parietal and posterior electrodes, resulting in 24 EEG-derived features per segment. Linear Support Vector Machine, Random Forest, and Gradient Boosting classifiers were evaluated using an 80/20 train-test split combined with 5-fold cross-validation. ResultsEEG-only classification achieved above-chance performance across models, with Random Forest yielding the highest accuracy (0.42), macro F1-score (0.414), and Cohens {kappa} (0.30), exceeding the theoretical chance level of 0.167. Feature importance analysis revealed distributed contributions across theta, alpha, and high-beta oscillatory activity, particularly over parietal and occipital regions, without evidence for a single dominant neural marker. Inclusion of an additional binary arousal-related feature substantially improved Random Forest performance (accuracy = 0.58; macro F1 = 0.579; {kappa} = 0.50), indicating that arousal organization contributed strongly to category separability within the classification framework. ConclusionsThese findings suggest that oscillatory EEG activity accompanying expressive musical action contains measurable statistical structure associated with emotionally differentiated performance states. Rather than identifying discrete neural correlates of emotion, the present results provide a computational characterization of distributed oscillatory dynamics emerging during expressive motor-acoustic interaction, extending affective EEG research beyond passive perception paradigms toward ecologically grounded musical performance contexts.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2026

Infra-delta oscillatory structure in expressive piano performance: evidence for a shared motor timing mechanism

This study examines the temporal dynamics of expressive piano performance by means of a quantitative analysis of motor timing in an elite pianist, with particular reference to stylistic contrasts between Baroque and Romantic repertoire. In line with kinematic models of expressive timing, which describe musical performance as reflecting principles of biological motion, we examined whether a common temporal structure underlies stylistically divergent executions. Despite marked differences in structural complexity and gesture density, both performances exhibited a shared low-frequency oscillatory pattern ([~]0.36 Hz) in beat-level timing variability. This infra-delta rhythmic modulation is consistent with the presence of an underlying motor timing scaffold and suggests a common temporal organization across expressive behaviors. These findings support the hypothesis that musical performance relies on a rhythmically structured control architecture, potentially shared with other complex motor activities such as speech and locomotion.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2024

Decoding Motivational States and Craving through Electrical Markers for Neural 'Mind Reading'

The aim of this electroencephalogram (EEG) study was to identify electrical neuro-markers of 12 different motivational and physiological states such as visceral craves, affective and somatosensory states, and secondary needs. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded in 30 right-handed participants while recalling a specific state upon the presentation of an auditory verbal command incorporating an evocative sound background consistent with that state (e.g. the chirping of cicadas associated with the verbal complaint about feeling hot). ERP data showed larger amplitude N400 responses in the affective and somatosensory states, while the P400 component displayed greater amplitudes for the secondary and visceral states. Furthermore, the two components were also discernibly responsive to the 12 micro-categories (e.g., joy vs. pain or hunger), by providing a distinctive electric pattern for mostly all microstates. The reconstruction of the intracranial generators of surface signals revealed common imagery-related activations, including the middle and superior frontal gyri, the fusiform and lingual gyri, supramarginal, and middle occipital regions, as well as the middle temporal region. Additionally, specific regions were identified that were active for distinct mentally represented content, such as that visceral needs were associated with activations in the medial and inferior frontal gyri, uncus, precuneus, and cingulate gyrus. Affective states were associated with activations in the medial frontal, superior temporal, and middle temporal gyri. Somatosensory states (e.g., pain or cold) activated regions in the parietal cortex and the crave for music was linked to activations in the auditory and motor regions. These findings support the use of ERP markers for BCI applications.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2021

Common neural bases for processing speech prosody and music: An integrated model

It is shared notion that speech and music processing share some commonalities. Brain bioelectrical activity was recorded in healthy participants listening to music obtained by digitally transforming real speech into melodies played by viola. Sentences were originally pronounced with a positive or negative affective prosody. The researchs aim was to investigate if the emotional content of music was extracted similarly to how the affective prosody of speech is processed. EEG was recorded from 128 electrodes in 20 healthy students. Participants had to detect rare neutral piano sounds while ignoring viola melodies. Stimulus negative valence increased the amplitude of frontal P300 and N400 ERP components while a late inferior frontal positivity was enhanced in response to positive melodies. Similar ERP markers were previously found for processing positive and negative music, vocalizations and speech. Source reconstruction applied to N400 showed that negative melodies engaged the right superior temporal gyrus and right anterior cingulate cortex, while positive melodies engaged the left middle and inferior temporal gyrus and the inferior frontal cortex. An integrated model is proposed depicting a possible common circuit for processing the emotional content of music, vocalizations and speech, which might explain some universal and relatively innate brain reaction to music.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2020

Beauty and the brain: Investigating the neural and musical attributes of beauty during a naturalistic music listening experience

Evaluative beauty judgments are very common, but in spite of this commonality, are rarely studied in cognitive neuroscience. Here we investigated the neural and musical attributes of musical beauty using a naturalistic free-listening paradigm applied to behavioral and neuroimaging recordings and validated by experts judgments. In Study 1, 30 Western healthy adult participants rated continuously the perceived beauty of three musical pieces using a motion sensor. This allowed us to identify the passages in the three musical pieces that were inter-subjectively judged as beautiful or ugly. This informed the analysis for Study 2, where additional 36 participants were recorded with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they listened attentively to the same musical pieces as in Study 1. In Study 3, in order to identify the musicological features characterizing the passages that were consistently rated as beautiful or ugly in Study 1, we collected post-hoc questionnaires from 12 music-composition experts. Results from Study 2 evidenced focal regional activity in the orbitofrontal brain structure when listening to beautiful passages of music, irrespectively of the subjective reactions and individual listening biographies. In turn, the moments in the music that were consistently rated as ugly were associated with bilateral supratemporal activity. Effective connectivity analysis also discovered inhibition of auditory activation and neural communication with orbitofrontal cortex, especially in the right hemisphere, during listening to beautiful musical passages as opposed to intrinsic activation of auditory cortices and decreased coupling to orbitofrontal cortex during listening to ugly musical passages. Experts questionnaires indicated that the beautiful passages were more melodic, calm, sad, slow, tonal, traditional and simple than the ones negatively valenced. In sum, we identified a neural mechanism for inter-subjective beauty judgments of music in the supratemporal-orbitofrontal circuit, irrespectively of individual taste and listening biography. Furthermore, some invariance in objective musical attributes of beautiful and ugly passages was evidenced. Future studies might address the generalizability of the findings to non-Western listeners.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2017

How emotional memory affects face remembering: an ERP investigation

It is known that the longer an information has been memorized, the stronger is its memory trace. At the same time it is known that the emotionally-valenced information has a stronger memory trace than neutral one. Interactive effects between these factors are largely unknown. In this study electrical neuroimaging signals were recorded in healthy controls to explore the neural mechanism of memory for faces of different emotional valence, sex, learning context and temporal recency. In a study phase participants familiarized with the fictional police dossier of 10 victims of dramatic deaths including homicide or earthquake (depicted as attractive and nice persons of about 45 years), twice a day for seven days before EEG recordings. Hundreds of famous movie stars (overlearned), victims (recent) and new faces were presented in an old/new recognition task. ERP responses showed a modulation of anterior N2 and FN400 as a function of face familiarity (with no differences between overlearned and recent faces), while parietal late positivity was sensitive to engram temporal recency (it was much larger to overlearned than recent faces, paralleling behavioral data). However, LP amplitude did not differ to overlearned vs. recent same-sex faces, showing how emotional memory can enhance faces remembering. A late frontal negativity revealed sensitive to source memory.

neuroscience↗