Predictability and Uncertainty in the Pleasure of Music: A Reward for Learning?

Abstract

Music ranks among the greatest human pleasures. It consistently engages the reward system, and converging evidence implies it exploits predictions to do so. Both prediction confirmations and errors are essential for understanding one's environment, and music offers many of each as it manipulates interacting patterns across multiple timescales. Learning models suggest that a balance of these outcomes (i.e., intermediate complexity) optimizes the reduction of uncertainty to rewarding and pleasurable effect. Yet evidence of a similar pattern in music is mixed, hampered by arbitrary measures of complexity. In the present studies, we applied a well-validated information-theoretic model of auditory expectation to systematically measure two key aspects of musical complexity: predictability (operationalized as information content [IC]), and uncertainty (entropy). In Study 1, we evaluated how these properties affect musical preferences in 43 male and female participants; in Study 2, we replicated Study 1 in an independent sample of 27 people and assessed the contribution of veridical predictability by presenting the same stimuli seven times. Both studies revealed significant quadratic effects of IC and entropy on liking that outperformed linear effects, indicating reliable preferences for music of intermediate complexity. An interaction between IC and entropy further suggested preferences for more predictability during more uncertain contexts, which would facilitate uncertainty reduction. Repeating stimuli decreased liking ratings but did not disrupt the preference for intermediate complexity. Together, these findings support long-hypothesized optimal zones of predictability and uncertainty in musical pleasure with formal modeling, relating the pleasure of music listening to the intrinsic reward of learning.

The Joyful Reduction of Uncertainty: Music Perception as a Window to Predictive Neuronal Processing

“…This result documents the independence of structural and veridical predictability, and it contrasts with earlier findings in which stimulus repetition was positively correlated with likability (Johnston, 2016). Data from both experiments by Gold et al (2019a) also showed stronger Wundt effects (i.e., higher skewness and kurtosis values) in participants with higher musical perceptual abilities. Behaviorally, this equates to sharper musical preferences, but interestingly not to a general preference shift toward more complex music in musical experts.…”

“…To reliably measure musical complexity, a recent article published in The Journal of Neuroscience used a computational model of auditory processing that acquires the syntactic structure (i.e., melodics) of a given musical style through variable-order Markov modeling (Gold et al, 2019a). The model predicts the pitch and onset time of a subsequent note based on long-and short-term musical contexts, weighed by their relative certainty.…”

Common and distinct neural correlates of music and food-induced pleasure: a coordinate-based meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies

“…Notably, bodily reactions such as 'chills' which are generally associated with particularly intense and pleasurable responses to music, and have been associated with greater engagement of the NAcc (Grewe et al, 2009(Grewe et al, , 2005Mas-Herrero et al, 2018b;Salimpoor et al, 2009), are often experienced following musical surprises (Grewe et al, 2007;Guhn et al, 2007;Harrison and Loui, 2014;Nagel et al, 2008;Panksepp, 1995;Sloboda, 1992). Finally, recent studies using an information-theoretic model of auditory expectation indicate that listeners may prefer music containing surprises, yet in a context in which those can be learned and anticipated (Cheung et al, 2019;Gold et al, 2019b). These findings resonate with learning theories that suggest that the information gain of balancing uncertainty and surprise (Oudeyer et al, 2016) could be intrinsically rewarded by the brain in order to foster our fundamental need of generating accurate models of the world.…”

“…food). For instance, while hedonic reactions and preference for primary tastes, such as sweetness, are largely innate and highly preserved across species and individuals (Berridge, 2000), musical preferences are shaped by previous exposure, cognitive abilities, musical education, and cultural background; thus they are largely influenced by learning and plasticity (Gold et al, 2019b(Gold et al, , 2019aGreenberg et al, 2015;Haumann et al, 2018). In this regard, recent models hold that music-induced pleasure may be driven by anticipation and prediction mechanisms, which, in turn, have been linked to predictive coding theories (Cheung et al, 2019;Gold et al, 2019b;Koelsch et al, 2019;Salimpoor et al, 2015).…”

“…For instance, while hedonic reactions and preference for primary tastes, such as sweetness, are largely innate and highly preserved across species and individuals (Berridge, 2000), musical preferences are shaped by previous exposure, cognitive abilities, musical education, and cultural background; thus they are largely influenced by learning and plasticity (Gold et al, 2019b(Gold et al, , 2019aGreenberg et al, 2015;Haumann et al, 2018). In this regard, recent models hold that music-induced pleasure may be driven by anticipation and prediction mechanisms, which, in turn, have been linked to predictive coding theories (Cheung et al, 2019;Gold et al, 2019b;Koelsch et al, 2019;Salimpoor et al, 2015). In line with this idea, neuroimaging studies have shown that music-induced pleasure may be mediated by the crosstalk between the ancient reward circuitry and higher-order cortical regions involved in auditory cognition and predictive coding that are phylogenetically newer and especially well developed in humans, such as the superior temporal gyrus and the inferior frontal gyrus (Loui et al, 2017;Martínez-Molina et al, 2016;Sachs et al, 2016;Salimpoor et al, 2013).…”