Nature-human's celebratory ties: indigenous foodways and festive traditions of central India.

Music and language () are among our species’ most distinctive cognitive capacities. Both domains organise perceptually discrete elements into hierarchical structures, following syntactic principles. The temporal unfolding of these syntactic sequences engages predictive processes that ultimately convey meaning, emotion, and aesthetic experience. These structural and evolutionary affinities have inspired extensive theoretical work on the comparative study of M&L (e.g.). A substantial empirical literature has compared behavioural (e.g.) and neurophysiological (e.g.) reactions to carefully controlled musical and linguistic stimuli, often attempting to specify purported shared cognitive and neuronal resources that reflect these affinities. Songs with lyrics represent particularly relevant objects of study in this context. While some neuropsychology studies suggest independent, dual encoding of lyrics and melody in songs, more recent evidence points to their perceptual connectedness in memory, underscoring the complexity of their integration during song listening. Songs offer an optimal naturalistic tool for studying the response to M&L specifically. Akin to a narrative unfolding, distinct features of M&L, such as chords of varying dissonance and words of varying affective valence, combine in songs to create patterns of tension-relaxation that drive a powerful affective experience. How M&L features integrate during song listening to engender affect remains however an open question. The interplay between expectation and its degree of fulfillment, thought to create our emotional response to song, reflects a feature of the predictive brain, whose complexity is not fully understood. In Western music, tension is a multifaceted construct driven by both music-structural features and psychoacoustic parameters. Tonal relations – the melodic and harmonic motion between pitch events – are major contributors to this experience, as movements away from a stable “home” chord or the use of unresolved dissonances can tense the music by violating listener expectations. Additional contributors include non-tonal structural features, such as rhythm and meter, and interpretative elements like loudness, tempo, and texture. Despite this complexity, musical tension holds intuitive appeal and demonstrates high reliability across listeners, bridging music-theoretical concepts with objective physiological measures of arousal. The present study focuses primarily on music-structural dimensions of tension, particularly prominent in the late-Romantic repertoire used here. While participants rated musical tension holistically, our analysis seeks to isolate the contributions of compositional structure from low-level acoustic fluctuations. To this end, we treated non-structural variables, such as loudness, as nuisance factors by including the audio signal’s loudness envelope as a regressor in our models. This approach allows for a clearer estimation of how the interplay between compositional architecture and linguistic narrative generates perceived tension.