Predictions and the brain: how musical sounds become rewarding

• Dopamine release in mesolimbic reward circuits leads to reinforcement tied to predictions and outcomes.
• Musical pleasure involves complex interactions between dopamine systems and cortical areas.
• Individual variability in superior temporal cortex may explain varied musical preferences.
• Cognitive, auditory, affective, and reward circuits interact to make music pleasurable.

Music has always played a central role in human culture. The question of how musical sounds can have such profound emotional and rewarding effects has been a topic of interest throughout generations. At a fundamental level, listening to music involves tracking a series of sound events over time. Because humans are experts in pattern recognition, temporal predictions are constantly generated, creating a sense of anticipation. We summarize how complex cognitive abilities and cortical processes integrate with fundamental subcortical reward and motivation systems in the brain to give rise to musical pleasure. This work builds on previous theoretical models that emphasize the role of prediction in music appreciation by integrating these ideas with recent neuroscientific evidence.