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

Kraus, Nils

doi:10.1523/jneurosci.0072-20.2020

Cited by 8 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 15 publications

(24 reference statements)

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“…In the auditory domain, an intermediate degree of unpredictability and its resolution during listening are thought to evoke musical pleasure [ 36 ] in agreement with predictive coding accounts of brain function [ 37 , 73 ] (for a review of possible neural correlates of musical expectations in the human brain, see [ 74 ]). We speculate that a certain degree of unpredictability in the distribution of basic structural (perceptual) features is one of the hallmarks of aesthetically appreciated stimuli.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 79%

Approximate Entropy in Canonical and Non-Canonical Fiction

Mohseni

Redies

Gast³

2022

Entropy

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Computational textual aesthetics aims at studying observable differences between aesthetic categories of text. We use Approximate Entropy to measure the (un)predictability in two aesthetic text categories, i.e., canonical fiction (`classics’) and non-canonical fiction (with lower prestige). Approximate Entropy is determined for series derived from sentence-length values and the distribution of part-of-speech-tags in windows of texts. For comparison, we also include a sample of non-fictional texts. Moreover, we use Shannon Entropy to estimate degrees of (un)predictability due to frequency distributions in the entire text. Our results show that the Approximate Entropy values can better differentiate canonical from non-canonical texts compared with Shannon Entropy, which is not true for the classification of fictional vs. expository prose. Canonical and non-canonical texts thus differ in sequential structure, while inter-genre differences are a matter of the overall distribution of local frequencies. We conclude that canonical fictional texts exhibit a higher degree of (sequential) unpredictability compared with non-canonical texts, corresponding to the popular assumption that they are more `demanding’ and `richer’. In using Approximate Entropy, we propose a new method for text classification in the context of computational textual aesthetics.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 79%

Approximate Entropy in Canonical and Non-Canonical Fiction

Mohseni

Redies

Gast³

2022

Entropy

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“…Exploratory behavior can be seen as resulting from a desire to reduce uncertainty, a mechanism that all biological agents share ( Friston, 2010 ; Schwartenbeck et al, 2013 ). Some studies and theoretical proposals suggest that uncertainty reduction is linked to positive affect and argue that it allows an agent to either confirm or update their existing predictive models ( Van de Cruys, 2017 ; Koelsch et al, 2019 ; Kraus, 2020 ). In the case of atonal music, this may be particularly relevant since increased regularity in these uncertain environments are reported to be particularly pleasant ( Mencke et al, 2022 ).…”

Section: Building Predictions In Atonal Musicmentioning

confidence: 99%

Atonal Music as a Model for Investigating Exploratory Behavior

et al. 2022

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Atonal music is often characterized by low predictability stemming from the absence of tonal or metrical hierarchies. In contrast, Western tonal music exhibits intrinsic predictability due to its hierarchical structure and therefore, offers a directly accessible predictive model to the listener. In consequence, a specific challenge of atonal music is that listeners must generate a variety of new predictive models. Listeners must not only refrain from applying available tonal models to the heard music, but they must also search for statistical regularities and build new rules that may be related to musical properties other than pitch, such as timbre or dynamics. In this article, we propose that the generation of such new predictive models and the aesthetic experience of atonal music are characterized by internal states related to exploration. This is a behavior well characterized in behavioral neuroscience as fulfilling an innate drive to reduce uncertainty but which has received little attention in empirical music research. We support our proposal with emerging evidence that the hedonic value is associated with the recognition of patterns in low-predictability sound sequences and that atonal music elicits distinct behavioral responses in listeners. We end by outlining new research avenues that might both deepen our understanding of the aesthetic experience of atonal music in particular, and reveal core qualities of the aesthetic experience in general.

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“…The last decade has seen an explosion in the use of information theory as a framework for conceptualizing music processing. Music listening, now ubiquitously couched in the language of predictive coding (Koelsch et al, 2019), would seem to offer a useful model for examining how we make predictions, how these predictions guide information seeking states and behaviors, and how such states and behaviors may be rewarded (Kraus, 2020). Over two studies, we put forward and tested the idea that music listening is a good model for investigating both information seeking states and the reward these sometimes afford.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Accounting for expressions of curiosity and enjoyment during music listening.

Omigie¹,

Ricci²

2023

Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts

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Music induces surprise and uncertainty in listeners as it unfolds. However, it remains unexamined whether it is also able to induce waxing and waning feelings of curiosity, how such feelings relate to the enjoyment of music, and what role music's information theoretic structure, on the one hand, and listeners' expertise and trait curiosity, on the other, may play. Here, we characterized melodies using a computational model and required participants to report on their experience of them as they unfolded. In a first experiment, listeners indicated, when cued, how curious they were as to how the melodies would continue. In a second experiment, a further set of participants completed two rating tasks -one in which they were cued to indicate felt curiosity, and another in which they were cued to indicate how much they were enjoying the melody -before completing a multidimensional assessment of curiosity. We found a positive association between curiosity and note information content (IC, surprisingness) that was more pronounced in low entropy (highly predictable) contexts. However, we found that curiosity ratings of listeners with no music-theory training (and little/no experience playing music) were less influenced by musical structure and more driven by judgments of stimulus valence. Finally, we showed that two subgroups of curious people, revealed using cluster analyses, did not differ in how well their curiosity ratings were explained by IC and entropy but differed in the extent to which their unfolding enjoyment of music changed as a function of IC. Taken together, our results demonstrate that musical structure interacts with musical background to influence the emergence of felt curiosity during music listening, while trait curiosity further influences how listening enjoyment emerges.

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

Cited by 8 publications

References 15 publications

Approximate Entropy in Canonical and Non-Canonical Fiction

Approximate Entropy in Canonical and Non-Canonical Fiction

Atonal Music as a Model for Investigating Exploratory Behavior

Accounting for expressions of curiosity and enjoyment during music listening.

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