Beauty and the brain – Investigating the neural and musical attributes of beauty during naturalistic music listening

Beauty judgments are common in daily life, but rarely studied in cognitive neuroscience. Here, in three studies, we searched for the neural mechanisms of musical beauty using a naturalistic free-listening paradigm applied to behavioral and neuroimaging recordings and validated by experts’ judgments. In Study 1, 30 adults continuously rated the perceived beauty of three musical pieces using a motion sensor. This served to identify the musical passages that were inter-subjectively judged as more or less beautiful (‘beautiful’ vs. ‘not-beautiful’ passages). For identifying the consistent neural determinants of the perception of musical beauty, we utilized these ratings in Study 2, where 36 adults were recorded with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they listened attentively to the same pieces of Study 1. In Study 3, to identify the musicological features characterizing the beautiful and not-beautiful passages of Studies 1–2, we collected post-hoc questionnaires from 12 music-composition experts. Results from Study 2 evidenced focal activity in the orbitofrontal cortex when listening to beautiful passages whereas the not-beautiful passages were associated with bilateral supratemporal activity. Effective connectivity analysis discovered inhibition of auditory activation and neural communication with the right orbitofrontal cortex for listening to beautiful passages vs. intrinsic activation of auditory cortices and decreased coupling to orbitofrontal cortex for not-beautiful passages. Experts’ questionnaires indicated that the beautiful passages were more melodic, calm, sad, slow, tonal, traditional, and simple than the ones rated negatively. In sum, we identified neural and psychological underpinnings of musical beauty, irrespectively of individual taste and listening biography.