Zoom Link: https://zoom.us/j/94523745378?pwd=SbEonxIcTdrOBKLlFehe1mXu9fMFOS.1

Abstract: Music has long been recognized as a powerful stimulus for evoking and modulating emotions, offering a rich framework to study the dynamic nature of emotional experience and its underlying neural and neurochemical mechanisms. This research proposal aims to advance a fundamental understanding of music-evoked emotions by employing a comprehensive, multimodal approach that integrates real-time emotion tracking, functional H1 magnetic resonance spectroscopy (fMRS), and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

We propose to first assess participants’ emotional dynamics through a computerized behavioral experiment. At the beginning of the experiment, cognitive and psychological states will be evaluated using pre-validated questionnaires to capture individual differences in mood, anxiety, and music engagement; factors expected to influence top-down emotional responses. Followed by which participants will listen to prevalidated naturalistic musical pieces, composed with variations in note and tempo, while continuously rating their emotional states along valence and arousal in a validated two-dimensional circumplex model using a joystick. This study will examine how bottom-up features (e.g., music structure) interact with top-down factors (e.g., mood) to influence variability in emotional responses. The dynamic H¹-MRS study employs a single voxel spectroscopy protocol to measure real-time fluctuations in neurochemicals such as NAA, Creatine, Glutamate, Glutamine, and GABA within the predefined region of interest; the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Participants will engage with the same musical stimuli and emotion rating task as in the behavioral experiment while inside the MRI scanner. This will enable the alignment of neurochemical dynamics with real-time emotional ratings, offering insight into the biochemical basis of emotional peaks and transitions. Functional MRI scans will be acquired to investigate the neural correlates of dynamic emotional experiences during music listening. We will employ intersubject correlation (ISC) and intersubject functional correlation (ISFC) analyses approaches well-suited for naturalistic stimuli such as music. These methods will quantify shared neural activity within specific brain regions and across networks, enabling us to map network-level dynamics underlying the perception of musical emotions.

This integrative, multimodal investigation combines behavioral experiments, real-time neurochemical measurement, and advanced fMRI analyses to bridge subjective emotional experience, neurochemical fluctuations, and neural network-level activity, providing novel insights into the neurobiology of music-evoked emotions. This study, being one of the first of its kind, primarily aims to advance a fundamental understanding of these mechanisms, however, findings may also inform future translational research on music’s impact on brain health and emotional well-being.

About the Speaker: Arijit Bhattacharya is pursuing his Ph.D. in the domain of Cognitive Computational Neuroscience at the MBBS Lab, Department of Psychology, Ashoka University. His research interest lies in the realm of neurochemistry and neurometabolism, music cognition, emotion, memory, and neuroimaging (MRS, fMRI). He graduated with B.Tech. and M.Tech. in Biotechnology with a specialization in Pharmaceutical Engineering from the School of Biotechnology, KIIT Deemed to be University. He has also completed a micro-bachelor's in Neuroscience from Harvard University Online. Arijit has been trained in cognitive neurology from the Department of Neurology, National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS) and is currently a jointly supervised PhD student between Ashoka University and NIMHANS. Arijit is continuing his current research work as a collaborative research project between Ashoka University and the National Neuroimaging Facility, National Brain Research Center (NBRC). He is also a music therapist, an Indian Flute and Sitar player with several national-level awards. He writes blogs on neuroscience and music on his webpage “The Musical Brains”.