Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Brain Sciences in Germany and the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Japan have explored in depth how the brain hears and processes musical sounds, and why familiar songs with well-known notes can spark joy even after hearing them many times. The findings were published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (RSTB).
The study centers on the predictive music coding model (PCM). According to PCM, enjoyment in music arises when listeners form expectations about what comes next and experience pleasure when those expectations are confirmed or surprised by the actual sounds that follow.
To ground their analysis, the team examined chord progressions drawn from commercially successful pop songs. These motifs were drawn from the McGill Billboard data set, which contains more than 80,000 chords across 745 songs that appeared on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the United States from 1958 to 1991. This rich catalog allowed researchers to test how commonly encountered harmonic patterns shape anticipation and satisfaction as the music unfolds.
In the experiments, 64 participants took part, including 13 professional musicians. They listened to music videos and rated how much they liked or disliked what they heard, providing a structured view of subjective preference in relation to musical structure.
Four computational models were used to predict participants’ responses. These models represented distinct facets of musical expectation: two focused on sensory processing, one integrated sensory and cognitive information, and the fourth emphasized purely cognitive aspects of anticipation. The comparison helped identify which elements most strongly drive enjoyment.
The results pointed to a surprising conclusion: the most important driver of musical pleasure is not only what is heard in the moment but also how familiar listeners are with related melodies and motifs. Repeated exposure builds robust mental templates that influence future expectations and moments of satisfaction when patterns recur or variate in meaningful ways.
Scientists propose that the brain processes music through two interacting systems. A fast, real-time system tracks the evolving structure of the piece, while a slower system generates predictions about what might come next. Together, they create a dynamic loop that shapes the listener’s experience as a track plays. These processes are influenced by lifelong listening history and by the brain’s inherent mechanisms for pattern recognition and reward.
As one of the study’s authors noted, the enjoyment of music emerges from the confirmation and disconfirmation of personal predictions. These expectations are largely learned through long-term exposure to specific genres, yet they are also shaped by how sounds are processed by neural circuits. In short, musical taste reflects an interaction between genetics and environment—the brain’s biology and the listener’s listening history both matter.
These insights align with broader ideas about how the brain encodes experience, suggesting that music taps into fundamental cognitive systems for prediction, memory, and reward. By revealing how familiarity moderates pleasure, the research offers a lens into why certain songs become enduring favorites and how repeated listening reinforces a sense of connection with the music and the culture around it. The work also underscores the value of interdisciplinary approaches that blend neuroscience, psychology, and music theory to illuminate everyday artistic experiences.
Previous studies have explored how to select music to counteract mood shifts and seasonal blues. The current findings add a deeper layer to that field, highlighting how the interplay between prediction and familiarity can be harnessed to shape listening experiences in meaningful ways. The researchers acknowledge that personal preference is nuanced, influenced by an array of experiences, but they emphasize the central role of predictive coding in shaping what listeners enjoy most when a familiar tune returns to the ears. The study thus contributes to a growing understanding of the neural basis for why certain melodies resonate so deeply and persist in our cultural soundscape.
In sum, music appreciation appears to hinge on dynamic predictive processes that fuse quick sensory judgments with longer-term cognitive expectations. As listeners become more familiar with a repertoire, their brains sharpen predictions and refine the pleasures associated with familiar patterns, creating a satisfying loop of anticipation, recognition, and reward. This interplay between learned expectations and neural processing helps explain why even well-worn songs can feel fresh and emotionally resonant when encountered again.
References and attributions: the research team notes that the observed effects reflect a combination of learned expectations from repeated exposure and the brain’s inherent predictive mechanisms, a synthesis that highlights both biology and experience in shaping musical preferences.