Using functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess the emotional response to room acoustics

A previous pilot study by the authors demonstrated the potential of using neuroimaging techniques to investigate a listener’s emotional response to room acoustic conditions of varying preference. The hypothesis of the pilot study and the present work is that regions associated with reward and pleasure will activate when an individual listens to pleasing room acoustics contrasted with listening to unpleasant room acoustics. In this study, auralizations were generated in simulated room conditions ranging from anechoic to extremely reverberant with the expectation that the most-liked stimuli would have reverberation times between 1.0 and 2.8 s. Participants were screened based on their ability to discern differences in preference across the stimuli. Following the screening, eligible participants rated the stimuli according to overall preference in a mock MRI machine. The results from the mock MRI testing were used to identify each participant’s most-liked and most-disliked stimuli, and to familiarize the participants with the MRI environment. In a second session, this pair of stimuli, along with anechoic and scrambled-music stimuli were presented to the subjects in an MRI machine. Contrasts between these conditions were analyzed to investigate if activations were present in regions associated with reward processing, including the nucleus accumbens, caudate nucleus, and orbitofrontal cortex.