Beauty and the brain: Investigating the neural and musical attributes of beauty during a naturalistic music listening experience

Evaluative beauty judgments are very common, but in spite of this commonality, are rarely studied in cognitive neuroscience. Here we investigated the neural and musical attributes of musical beauty using a naturalistic free-listening paradigm applied to behavioral and neuroimaging recordings and validated by experts' judgments. In Study 1, 30 Western healthy adult participants rated continuously the perceived beauty of three musical pieces using a motion sensor. This allowed us to identify the passages in the three musical pieces that were inter-subjectively judged as beautiful or ugly. This informed the analysis for Study 2, where additional 36 participants were recorded with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they listened attentively to the same musical pieces as in Study 1. In Study 3, in order to identify the musicological features characterizing the passages that were consistently rated as beautiful or ugly in Study 1, we collected post-hoc questionnaires from 12 music-composition experts. Results from Study 2 evidenced focal regional activity in the orbitofrontal brain structure when listening to beautiful passages of music, irrespectively of the subjective reactions and individual listening biographies. In turn, the moments in the music that were consistently rated as ugly were associated with bilateral supratemporal activity. Effective connectivity analysis also discovered inhibition of auditory activation and neural communication with orbitofrontal cortex, especially in the right hemisphere, during listening to beautiful musical passages as opposed to intrinsic activation of auditory cortices and decreased coupling to orbitofrontal cortex during listening to ugly musical passages. Experts' questionnaires indicated that the beautiful passages were more melodic, calm, sad, slow, tonal, traditional and simple than the ones negatively valenced. In sum, we identified a neural mechanism for inter-subjective beauty judgments of music in the supratemporal-orbitofrontal circuit, irrespectively of individual taste and listening biography. Furthermore, some invariance in objective musical attributes of beautiful and ugly passages was evidenced. Future studies might address the generalizability of the findings to non-Western listeners.