The influence of music elements on the understanding of emotional musical meaning: based on the perspective of interval structure

Music has become an indispensable part of people's lives, frequently encountered in various contexts of daily living. Understanding the emotional significance of music is a crucial foundation for its use. This study employed the cross-modal affective priming paradigm, combined with event-related potential technology to investigate the influence of music elements on the emotional musical meaning from the perspective of interval structure. Two different forms of musical intervals (melodic interval and harmonic interval) and intervals with different varying degrees of consonance were used as priming stimuli and emotional words as target stimuli. The research results found that, compared to melodic intervals, participants responded faster and with higher accuracy under the harmonic interval condition, which also elicited a larger N400 component. Furthermore, the N400 amplitudes were smaller in four conditions compared to the dissonant-positive and consonant-positive conditions, and the consonant-negative condition elicited a significantly larger N400 amplitude than the dissonant-negative and partially consonant-negative conditions. This finding suggest that both interval type and consonance level influence emotional musical meaning, and interval structure plays a critical role in the understanding of emotional musical meaning.