Neural Correlates of Music Listening: Does the Music Matter?

Mark Reybrouck,Elvira Brattico,Peter Vuust

doi:10.3390/brainsci11121553

Abstract

The last decades have seen a proliferation of music and brain studies, with a major focus on plastic changes as the outcome of continuous and prolonged engagement with music. Thanks to the advent of neuroaesthetics, research on music cognition has broadened its scope by considering the multifarious phenomenon of listening in all its forms, including incidental listening up to the skillful attentive listening of experts, and all its possible effects. These latter range from objective and sensorial effects directly linked to the acoustic features of the music to the subjectively affective and even transformational effects for the listener. Of special importance is the finding that neural activity in the reward circuit of the brain is a key component of a conscious listening experience. We propose that the connection between music and the reward system makes music listening a gate towards not only hedonia but also eudaimonia, namely a life well lived, full of meaning that aims at realizing one’s own “daimon” or true nature. It is argued, further, that music listening, even when conceptualized in this aesthetic and eudaimonic framework, remains a learnable skill that changes the way brain structures respond to sounds and how they interact with each other.

Highlights

Music listening is an experience that has been operationalized by psychologists and neuroscientists in recent decades as mainly concerning the auditory system and cognitive and affective functions
The evaluative judgment strengthened intercommunication only between areas related to auditory processing and action observation, and between higher-order structures involved with visual processing. In another functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, Bogert et al [103] modulated the visual instructions related to 4-s music clips, asking to pay attention either to the numbers of instruments playing in the clip or to explicitly classify the emotions conveyed by the music
We have focused on how certain individual, cultural, and acoustic factors affect music listening with a special focus on their neurobiological underpinnings, somewhat in line with a very recent meta-analysis on music listening and imagery

Summary

Introduction

Music listening is an experience that has been operationalized by psychologists and neuroscientists in recent decades as mainly concerning the auditory system and cognitive and affective functions. Short term features—defined as being within a 25 ms analysis window—include timbral properties such as zero crossing rate, spectral centroid, high energy-low energy ratio, spectral spread, spectral roll-off, spectral entropy, spectral flatness, roughness, RMS energy, spectral flux, and Sub-Band Flux; the latter include pulse clarity, fluctuation centroid, fluctuation entropy, musical mode, and key clarity All these features are related to one of the traditional dimensions in music theory, such as pitch and tonality, rhythm, timbre, and dynamics (see Box 1 for clarification). Rapid acoustical changes in real music—such as changes in brightness, root mean square (RMS) amplitude, zero-crossing rate, and spectral flux (see [31] for technical details)—induce transient evoked cortical responses [31,32], similar to the ones observed in relation to isolated simple sound feature changes, such as a new frequency, or timbre, or duration, or even contour, and meter [33,34,35,36].

Schematic

From Incidental Listening to Full-Fledged Aesthetic Experience

Neural Mechanisms of Coping with the Sounds

Aesthetic Listening and the Generation of Pleasure

Conclusions