Constituents of Music and Visual-Art Related Pleasure – A Critical Integrative Literature Review

Abstract

The present literature review investigated how pleasure induced by music and visual-art has been conceptually understood in empirical research over the past 20 years. After an initial selection of abstracts from seven databases (keywords: pleasure, reward, enjoyment, and hedonic), twenty music and eleven visual-art papers were systematically compared. The following questions were addressed: (1) What is the role of the keyword in the research question? (2) Is pleasure considered a result of variation in the perceiver’s internal or external attributes? (3) What are the most commonly employed methods and main variables in empirical settings? Based on these questions, our critical integrative analysis aimed to identify which themes and processes emerged as key features for conceptualizing art-induced pleasure. The results demonstrated great variance in how pleasure has been approached: In the music studies pleasure was often a clear object of investigation, whereas in the visual-art studies the term was often embedded into the context of an aesthetic experience, or used otherwise in a descriptive, indirect sense. Music studies often targeted different emotions, their intensity or anhedonia. Biographical and background variables and personality traits of the perceiver were often measured. Next to behavioral methods, a common method was brain imaging which often targeted the reward circuitry of the brain in response to music. Visual-art pleasure was also frequently addressed using brain imaging methods, but the research focused on sensory cortices rather than the reward circuit alone. Compared with music research, visual-art research investigated more frequently pleasure in relation to conscious, cognitive processing, where the variations of stimulus features and the changing of viewing modes were regarded as explanatory factors of the derived experience. Despite valence being frequently applied in both domains, we conclude, that in empirical music research pleasure seems to be part of core affect and hedonic tone modulated by stable personality variables, whereas in visual-art research pleasure is a result of the so called conceptual act depending on a chosen strategy to approach art. We encourage an integration of music and visual-art into to a multi-modal framework to promote a more versatile understanding of pleasure in response to aesthetic artifacts.

Relaxed and connected: Insights into the emotional–motivational constituents of musical pleasure

“…Musical objects are perhaps perceived more straightforwardly as physical stimulation (basic pleasures, see e.g., Berridge & Kringelbach, 2008), while visual objects are enjoyed more as higher-order pleasures (containing evaluative aspects). This is in line with a recent review that showed that music research has studied pleasure particularly through reward and emotion, while visual research has approached pleasure through cognitive processing and as part of aesthetic appreciation (Tiihonen,et al, 2017).…”

“…Does the emotional–motivational constitution of musical pleasure have a similarity with visual pleasure? Finally, the specificity of this constitution to music was explored through comparison with the visual domain, This part of the study was kept purely exploratory in nature, because there is little prior research comparing the pleasure and reward experiences in musical and visual domains (Tiihonen, Brattico, Maksimainen, Wikgren, & Saarikallio, 2017).…”

Beauty and the brain: Investigating the neural and musical attributes of beauty during a naturalistic music listening experience

“…To our knowledge only one study, thus far, addressed the question of neural mechanisms for attributing beauty value to music (Ishizu and Zeki 2011). This contrasts with the wide interest for understanding the neural correlates of this common type of judgment in visual cognitive neuroscience (Pearce et al 2016;Tiihonen et al 2017).…”

Familiarity and Novelty in Aesthetic Preference: The Effects of the Properties of the Artwork and the Beholder

“…Novelty seeking is not only one of the fundamental propensities of human beings (Fantz, 1964) but also a critical value that is pursued in art (Martindale, 1990;Hekkert and van Wieringen, 1996). Novelty is essential to understanding aesthetic preferences in the field of empirical aesthetics (Berlyne, 1950(Berlyne, , 1970Menninghaus et al, 2019), along with various perceptual (e.g., complexity, symmetry, golden ratio), emotional (e.g., pleasure, empathy, awe), and cognitive (e.g., knowledge, expertise, context) attributes that influence preference decisions (Imamoglu, 2000;Leder et al, 2004;Chatterjee and Vartanian, 2014;Chassy et al, 2015;Street et al, 2016;Jacobsen and Beudt, 2017;Tiihonen et al, 2017).…”