Abstract
The importance of music in our daily life has given rise to an increased number of studies addressing the brain regions involved in its appreciation. Some of these studies controlled only for the familiarity of the stimuli, while others relied on pleasantness ratings, and others still on musical preferences. With a listening test and a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment, we wished to clarify the role of familiarity in the brain correlates of music appreciation by controlling, in the same study, for both familiarity and musical preferences. First, we conducted a listening test, in which participants rated the familiarity and liking of song excerpts from the pop/rock repertoire, allowing us to select a personalized set of stimuli per subject. Then, we used a passive listening paradigm in fMRI to study music appreciation in a naturalistic condition with increased ecological value. Brain activation data revealed that broad emotion-related limbic and paralimbic regions as well as the reward circuitry were significantly more active for familiar relative to unfamiliar music. Smaller regions in the cingulate cortex and frontal lobe, including the motor cortex and Broca's area, were found to be more active in response to liked music when compared to disliked one. Hence, familiarity seems to be a crucial factor in making the listeners emotionally engaged with music, as revealed by fMRI data.
Highlights
Listening to music is one of the most pleasurable human experiences, and one in which we invest a considerable amount of time and money
Listening test data The analysis of the data from the listening test evidenced that, within the universe of songs selected for the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment, the liking ratings for familiar songs were higher than for unfamiliar songs, both in the liked and disliked conditions
We further explored the contribution of familiarity and musical preferences to this general pattern of brain activation
Summary
Listening to music is one of the most pleasurable human experiences, and one in which we invest a considerable amount of time and money. In a survey study [1], most subjects stated that their investment in this activity derives from the ability of music to convey emotions. For this reason, a better knowledge of how and why emotions are generated when listening to music will contribute to our understanding of why music is so important to our species. We investigated whether familiarity and aesthetic preferences in music have a role in determining the emotional involvement of the listener, and which of the two factors contributes the most to the recruitment of the limbic and reward centres of the brain. It has been proposed that basic emotions are the immediate affective responses to music, likely mainly originating from the brainstem, which derive from the association or mimicking of acoustic cues present in the music with those residing in emotional (human or animal) vocalizations [6,7,8,9]
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