Why Music Sounds Good

Why Music Sounds Good

Summary

By looking at activity in just one part of the brain, researchers can now predict roughly how much volunteers like a new song. When people hear music they like, a clump of neurons deep within their brains bursts into excited activity. The small cluster of cells, called the nucleus accumbens, helps make predictions and sits in the “reward center” of the brain. The small bit acts with three other regions in the brain to judge new songs, MRI scans showed. One region looks for patterns, another compares new songs to sounds heard before, and the third checks for emotional ties. As ears pick up the first notes of a new song, the brain tries to make sense of the music and figure out what’s coming next. Then when the brain’s predictions are right, people get a little jolt of pleasure. In this study, the researchers examined the brain activity of 19 people as they listened to short clips of new music in an MRI machine. At the end of each clip, volunteers could choose to buy songs they liked, using their own money. The researchers asked them how much they would be willing to pay, $0.99, $1.29 or $2, in a system similar to iTunes. If volunteers did not like a song, they could choose not to buy it. Then researchers compared brain scans of participants who bid different amounts on songs. The nucleus accumbens switched on when people heard songs they wanted to purchase. The more money people chose to spend, the more their nucleus accumbens was working while listening. This work could help scientists better understand how humans decipher other complex sounds, such as speech.

Relevance

In class we learned about the brain and how it controls the body, including feelings. We also discussed the connections between neurons in the brain.