Neurocognitive mechanisms for decoding emotions in voices and music

Various types of sounds carry emotional meaning, ranging from environmental, biological, to technical sounds. Within the soundscape of biological sounds, voices have an important significance for human social interactions and especially for communication as a carrier for emotional meaning. With regard to sounds produced by musical instruments and digital devices, music is an evolved cultural means of creating sounds that elicit emotional reactions in listeners. Both non-speech vocalizations and music share their ability to encode emotional meaning in acoustic sound features, to communicate these emotions to others, and that listeners can accurately decode this meaning based on cognitive and neural mechanisms. In this chapter, we outline the various emotions that can be portrayed in voice and in music, as well as the acoustic features that are used to express these emotions. We summarize the neural mechanisms that have been discussed within the neuroscientific research fields on vocal and musical emotions and outline a unifying framework for the neurocognitive functions involved in affective sound processing. We finally describe the commonalities between vocal and musical emotion processing from a cognitive and neural perspective, but also highlight the differential effects between both emotional sound domains by suggesting a possible evolutionary perspective.