Individual differences in affective and cognitive processing of musical pitch

2012

Musical pitch processing has been studied extensively, but rarely in the context of affective pitch processing, or of individual differences in pitch processing. In this study, participants answered surveys measuring personality and empathy dimensions. They then listened to tonal chord sequences to determine whether they sounded correct or incorrect, and whether they sounded happy or sad, while electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded. The last chord of each sequence could be either incorrect (containing one note which is out of tune) or correct (containing no such mistuning), and affective content was varied by having sequences resolve in major and minor modes. Personality dimension agreeab…