Exploring the Effects of Musical Features on Autonomic Modulation: a Preliminary Study

Although it is known that music can modulate emotions affecting the autonomic nervous system (ANS) responses, hypotheses on the time-varying influence of specific musical features on nonlinear ANS modulation are still unclear. In this study, we used cardiovascular data from the Continuously Annotated Signal of Emotion dataset. Specifically, we considered one of the stimuli (a relaxing piano piece), extracted the loudness and the envelope of the fundamental frequency (F0 envelope), and analysed the ANS dynamics of the 30 participants. The Convergent Cross Mapping approach was employed to infer the causal relationship between the music features and the time-varying frequency parameters of heart rate variability. Our approach evidenced differential statistical results related to F<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</inf> envelope and loudness. This suggests that music features can play different roles in driving ANS responses and that the present approach allows to quantify the strength of this causal coupling.