From Perception to Pleasure

Abstract

Abstract How does perception of abstract tonal patterns—music—lead to the pleasure we experience from these sounds? The answer presented in this book is that pleasure in music arises from interactions between cortical loops that enable processing of sound patterns and subcortical circuits responsible for reward and valuation. The auditory cortex and its ventral-stream connections encode acoustical features and their relationships, maintain them in working memory, and form internal representations of statistical patterns from which predictions are made about how sound patterns evolve in time. Disruption of this pathway leads to amusia. The auditory dorsal stream allows for sensory-motor transformations, music production, and metrical representation, leading to predictions of when events will occur. These predictive processes play a central role in creating expectancies about musical events that are transmitted to the dopaminergic reward system, where hedonic responses are generated according to how well an event fits with predictions. These responses are linked to the balance between predictability and surprise in musical patterns. Disruption of interactions between perceptual and reward systems leads to musical anhedonia. Engagement of the reward system is also related to movement and vocal cues, social factors, musical preference, and emotion regulation.