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arXiv · 2509.21381

Toward a Realistic Encoding Model of Auditory Affective Understanding in the Brain

Guandong Pan·Yaqian Yang·Shi Chen·Xin Wang·Longzhao Liu·Hongwei Zheng·Shaoting Tang
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Abstract

In affective neuroscience and emotion-aware AI, understanding how complex auditory stimuli drive emotion arousal dynamics remains unresolved. This study introduces a computational framework to model the brain's encoding of naturalistic auditory inputs into dynamic behavioral/neural responses across three datasets (SEED, LIRIS, self-collected BAVE). Guided by neurobiological principles of parallel auditory hierarchy, we decompose audio into multilevel auditory features (through classical algorithms and wav2vec 2.0/Hubert) from the original and isolated human voice/background soundtrack elements, mapping them to emotion-related responses via cross-dataset analyses. Our analysis reveals that high-level semantic representations (derived from the final layer of wav2vec 2.0/Hubert) exert a dominant role in emotion encoding, outperforming low-level acoustic features with significantly stronger mappings to behavioral annotations and dynamic neural synchrony across most brain regions ($p < 0.05$). Notably, middle layers of wav2vec 2.0/hubert (balancing acoustic-semantic information) surpass the final layers in emotion induction across datasets. Moreover, human voices and soundtracks show dataset-dependent emotion-evoking biases aligned with stimulus energy distribution (e.g., LIRIS favors soundtracks due to higher background energy), with neural analyses indicating voices dominate prefrontal/temporal activity while soundtracks excel in limbic regions. By integrating affective computing and neuroscience, this work uncovers hierarchical mechanisms of auditory-emotion encoding, providing a foundation for adaptive emotion-aware systems and cross-disciplinary explorations of audio-affective interactions.

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Guandong Pan, Yaqian Yang, Shi Chen, Xin Wang, Longzhao Liu, Hongwei Zheng, Shaoting Tang. 2025-09-23. Toward a Realistic Encoding Model of Auditory Affective Understanding in the Brain. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21381

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