Expressing emotions through music

Abstract

Music evokes strong emotions across listeners although it conveys no biologically relevant information regarding the survival challenges in the environment. Here we review the neurobiology and psychology of emotional communication through music, focussing on the functions and mechanisms of musical emotional expressions in social interaction. We also extend our analysis of the communicative space beyond the pure acoustic features to the interaction of musical emotional cues with other verbal and non-verbal communication channels. Activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies shows functional overlap for brain systems involved in music production and emotions. Musical emotion communication, however, differs from other common expressive channels (faces and bodies, utterances and semantics) in its timescale, context, spontaneity and interactivity. Musical emotional communication can be modulated by affective information conveyed through verbal and other non-verbal channels. This makes music a flexible and culturally malleable means of context-dependent emotional communication that is particularly well suited for facilitating large-scale social affiliation and bonding. This article is part of the theme issue 'Mechanisms, development, phylogeny and functions of emotional expressions'.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences, 2026 · DOI ↗