Conveying the concept of movement in music: An event-related brain potential study

Abstract

This study on event-related brain potential investigated whether music can convey the concept of movement. Using a semantic priming paradigm, natural musical excerpts were presented to non-musicians, followed by semantically congruent or incongruent pictures that depicted objects either in motion or at rest. The priming effects were tested in object decision and implicit recognition tasks to distinguish the effects of automatic conceptual activation from response competition. Results showed that in both tasks, pictures that were incongruent to preceding musical excerpts elicited larger N400 than congruent pictures, suggesting that music can prime the representations of movement concepts. Results of the multiple regression analysis showed that movement expression could be well predicted by specific acoustic and musical features, indicating the associations between music per se and the processing of iconic musical meaning.

Keywords: Conceptual processing; ERP; Movement; Music; N400.