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Music in the brain

Nature Reviews Neuroscience volume 23, pages 287–305 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

Music is ubiquitous across human cultures — as a source of affective and pleasurable experience, moving us both physically and emotionally — and learning to play music shapes both brain structure and brain function. Music processing in the brain — namely, the perception of melody, harmony and rhythm — has traditionally been studied as an auditory phenomenon using passive listening paradigms. However, when listening to music, we actively generate predictions about what is likely to happen next. This enactive aspect has led to a more comprehensive understanding of music processing involving brain structures implicated in action, emotion and learning. Here we review the cognitive neuroscience literature of music perception. We show that music perception, action, emotion and learning all rest on the human brain’s fundamental capacity for prediction — as formulated by the predictive coding of music model. This Review elucidates how this formulation of music perception and expertise in individuals can be extended to account for the dynamics and underlying brain mechanisms of collective music making. This in turn has important implications for human creativity as evinced by music improvisation. These recent advances shed new light on what makes music meaningful from a neuroscientific perspective.

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Fig. 1: From the structural constituents of music to perception, action and emotion in the brain.
Fig. 2: Predictive coding of music.
Fig. 3: How we may experience the same musical material with different real-time predictive brain models.
Fig. 4: Groove: the pleasurable sensation of wanting to move to music.
Fig. 5: Musical interaction.

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Acknowledgements

Funding was provided by The Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF117). The authors thank E. Altenmüller and D. Huron for comments on early versions of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Music in the Brain, Aarhus University and The Royal Academy of Music (Det Jyske Musikkonservatorium), Aarhus, Denmark

    Peter Vuust, Ole A. Heggli & Morten L. Kringelbach

  2. Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, University College London, London, UK

    Karl J. Friston

  3. Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Morten L. Kringelbach

  4. Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing, Linacre College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Morten L. Kringelbach

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  1. Peter Vuust
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  2. Ole A. Heggli
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  4. Morten L. Kringelbach
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Correspondence to Peter Vuust.

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Glossary

Melody

Patterns of pitched sounds unfolding over time, in accordance with cultural conventions and constraints.

Harmony

The combination of multiple, simultaneously pitched sounds to form a chord, and subsequent chord progressions, a fundamental building block of Western music. The rules of harmony are the hierarchically organized expectations for chord progressions.

Rhythm

The structured arrangement of successive sound events over time, a primary parameter of musical structure. Rhythm perception is based on the perception of duration and grouping of these events and can be achieved even if sounds are not discrete, such as amplitude-modulated sounds.

Expectations

Mathematically, the expected values or means of random variables.

Statistical learning

The ability to extract statistical regularities from the world to learn about the environment.

Tonality

In Western music, the organization of melody and harmony in a hierarchy of relations, often pointing towards a referential pitch (the tonal centre or the tonic).

Metre

A predictive framework governing the interpretation of regularly recurring patterns and accents in rhythm.

Predictions

The output of a model generating outcomes from their causes. In predictive coding, the prediction is generated from expected states of the world and compared with observed outcomes to form a prediction error.

Anticipation

The subjective experience accompanying a strong expectation that a particular event will occur.

Active inference

An enactive generalization of predictive coding that casts both action and perception as minimizing surprise or prediction error (active inference is considered a corollary of the free-energy principle).

Prediction error

A quantity used in predictive coding to denote the difference between an observation or point estimate and its predicted value. Predictive coding uses precision-weighted prediction errors to update expectations that generate predictions.

Schematic expectations

Expectations of musical events based on prior knowledge of regularities and patterns in musical sequences, such as melodies and chords.

Veridical expectations

Expectations of specific events or patterns in a familiar musical sequence.

Dynamic expectations

Short-lived expectations that dynamically shift owing to the ongoing musical context, such as when a repeated musical phrase causes the listener to expect similar phrases as the work continues.

Precision

The inverse variance or negative entropy of a random variable. It corresponds to a second-order statistic (for example, a second-order moment) of the variable’s probability distribution or density. This can be contrasted with the mean or expectation, which constitutes a first-order statistic (for example, a first-order moment).

Mismatch negativity

(MMN). A component of the auditory event-related potential recorded with electroencephalography or magnetoencephalography related to a change in different sound features such as pitch, timbre, location of the sound source, intensity and rhythm. It peaks approximately 110–250 ms after change onset and is typically recorded while participants’ attention is distracted from the stimulus, usually by watching a silent film or reading a book. The amplitude and latency of the MMN depends on the deviation magnitude, such that larger deviations in the same context yield larger and faster MMN responses.

Functional MRI

(fMRI). A neuroimaging technique that images rapid changes in blood oxygenation levels in the brain.

Groove

In the realm of contemporary music, a persistently repeated pattern played by the rhythm section (usually drums, percussion, bass, guitar and/or piano). In music psychology, the pleasurable sensation of wanting to move.

Pitch

The perceptual correlate of periodicity in sounds that allows their ordering on a frequency-related musical scale.

Timbre

Also known as tone colour or tone quality, the perceived sound quality of a sound, including its spectral composition and its additional noise characteristics.

Chroma

The pitch class containing all pitches separated by an integer number of octaves. Humans perceive a similarity between notes having the same chroma.

Information content

The contextual unexpectedness or surprise associated with an event.

Entropy

In the Shannon sense, the expected surprise or information content (self-information). In other words, it is the uncertainty or unpredictability of a random variable (for example, an event in the future).

Magnetoencephalography

(MEG). A neuroimaging technique that measures the magnetic fields produced by naturally occurring electrical activity in the brain.

Event-related potential

A very small electrical voltage generated in the brain structures in response to specific events or stimuli.

Consonant and dissonant intervals

Psychologically, consonance is when two or more notes sound together with an absence of perceived roughness. Dissonance is the antonym of consonance. Western listeners consider intervals produced by frequency ratios such as 1:2 (octave), 3:2 (fifth) or 4:3 (fourth) as consonant. Dissonances are intervals produced by frequency ratios formed from numbers greater than 4.

Harmonic cadences

Stereotypical patterns consisting of two or more chords that conclude a phrase, section or piece of music. They are often used to establish a sense of tonality.

Electroencephalography

(EEG). An electrophysiological method that measures electrical activity of the brain.

Frequency tagging

A method of analysing steady-state evoked potentials arising from stimulation or aspects of stimulation repeated at a fixed rate. An example of frequency tagging analysis is shown in Fig. 1c.

Syncopations

A shift of rhythmic emphasis from metrically strong accents to weak accents, a characteristic of multiple musical genres, such as funk, jazz and hip hop.

Eudaimonia

In Aristotelian ethics, refers to a life well lived or human flourishing, and in affective neuroscience, it is often used to describe meaningful pleasure.

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Vuust, P., Heggli, O.A., Friston, K.J. et al. Music in the brain. Nat Rev Neurosci 23, 287–305 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-022-00578-5

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