Timbre is an important factor that affects the perception of emotion in music. To date, little is known about the effects of timbre on neural responses to musical emotion. To address this issue, we used ERPs to investigate whether there are different neural responses to musical emotion when the same melodies are presented in different timbres. With a cross-modal affective priming paradigm, target faces were primed by affectively congruent or incongruent melodies without lyrics presented in violin, flute, and the voice. Results showed a larger P3 and a larger left anterior distributed LPC in response to affectively incongruent versus congruent trials in the voice version. For the flute version, however, only the LPC effect was found, which was distributed over centro-parietal electrodes. Unlike the voice and flute versions, an N400 effect was observed in the violin version. These findings revealed different patterns of neural responses to emotional processing of music when the same melodies were presented in different timbres, and provide evidence to confirm the hypothesis that there are specialized neural responses to the human voice.

中文翻译：

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音色对神经对音乐情感反应的影响

音色是影响音乐情感感的重要因素。迄今为止，关于音色对音乐情感的神经反应的影响知之甚少。为了解决这个问题，我们使用ERP来调查在不同音色中出现相同旋律时对音乐情感的神经反应是否不同。使用跨模式的情感启动范例，目标面部由情感一致或不一致的旋律启动，而小提琴，长笛和声音中没有歌词。结果显示，在语音版本中，情感上不一致的和一致的试验对P3的影响更大，左前LPC的分布也更大。但是，对于长笛版本，仅发现了LPC效应，该效应分布在中心顶电极上。不同于语音和长笛版本，在小提琴版本中观察到N400效果。这些发现揭示了当在不同音色中呈现相同的旋律时，对音乐的情感处理的神经反应的不同模式，并提供了证据来证实对人的声音存在专门的神经反应的假设。