Scaling behaviour in music and cortical dynamics interplay to mediate music listening pleasure

Abstract

The pleasure of music listening regulates daily behaviour and promotes rehabilitation in healthcare. Human behaviour emerges from the modulation of spontaneous timely coordinated neuronal networks. Too little is known about the physical properties and neurophysiological underpinnings of music to understand its perception, its health benefit and to deploy personalized or standardized music-therapy. Prior studies revealed how macroscopic neuronal and music patterns scale with frequency according to a 1/fα relationship, where a is the scaling exponent. Here, we examine how this hallmark in music and neuronal dynamics relate to pleasure. Using electroencephalography, electrocardiography and behavioural data in healthy subjects, we show that music listening decreases the scaling exponent of neuronal activity and—in temporal areas—this change is linked to pleasure. Default-state scaling exponents of the most pleased individuals were higher and approached those found in music loudness fluctuations. Furthermore, the scaling in selective regions and timescales and the average heart rate were largely proportional to the scaling of the melody. The scaling behaviour of heartbeat and neuronal fluctuations were associated during music listening. Our results point to a 1/f resonance between brain and music and a temporal rescaling of neuronal activity in the temporal cortex as mechanisms underlying music appreciation.

Cognitive and sensory expectations independently shape musical expectancy and pleasure

“…Nevertheless, Distinct roles of cognitive and sensory information in musical expectancy 30 the effect of auditory short-term memory on expectancy shown in the present work also highlights how music perception, and consequently the affective responses elicited by music, is inherently constrained by the structure of the human sensory system. This echoes the parallel between observing 1/f power-law distributions in rhythm and pitch in music across all human societies (Mehr et al, 2019) and the increased sensitivity of sensory neurons towards signals that exhibit a 1/f structure (Levitin et al, 2012), which also affects musical pleasure (Teixeira Borges et al, 2019).…”

A GABA Interneuron Deficit Model of the Art of Vincent van Gogh

“…This is interesting because the same logarithmic decay has been observed in the autocorrelation function of structural brain images and characterizes both the time and space correlation at rest in human functional activity when measured with EEG, MEG or fMRI (52). The similarity between the autocorrelation function of the art piece and the functional response to it by the observer has been indicated as the potential mechanism underlying the appreciation of painters (53) with specific examples such as Jackson Pollock (54) (but see also (55) for a quantitative comparison between Pollock and van Gogh), as well as of composers, such as Bach and Mozart (56)(57)(58).…”

The subjectivity of self and its ontology: From the world–brain relation to the point of view in the world

“…Borges et al (2018), for instance, demonstrated how the degree of scale-freeness in the brain in different frequency bands follows variations in the scale-free envelope of speech, and how their degree of correspondence impacts speech comprehension. Analogously, Borges et al (2019) show how the scale-free structures of the brain and music adapt to each other, with the brain’s neural activity somewhat rescaling the musical structure. The timing of the neuronal fluctuations, as observed in the brain’s scale-free activity, followed the timing of the fluctuations in the music (i.e., its scale-free activity), although the latter operated on a wider range of temporal scales than did the brain.…”