How Beautiful Music Shapes Brain Connectivity
Saturday, February 15, 2025.
Isaac Asimov once remarked that the most exciting phrase in science is not "Eureka!" but "That's funny..."
And what could be funnier than the fact that our brains—those magnificent squishy machines—respond to beauty in music with an intricate dance of connectivity, while responding to non-beautiful music with the neural equivalent of a polite shrug?
A recent study published in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts sought to decode what happens in the brain when we experience musical beauty.
Researchers Ruijiao Dai, Petri Toiviainen, Peter Vuust, Thomas Jacobsen, and Elvira Brattico used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine how different regions of the brain communicate when we hear music that moves us.
Their findings suggest that when a piece of music is perceived as beautiful, brain regions responsible for reward and visual processing engage in a unique synchrony, while music perceived as "meh" keeps the brain stuck in more primitive auditory processing loops.
Beauty: A Neural Collaboration
The ability to appreciate beauty—whether in art, nature, or music—is so fundamental to human existence that it likely predates spoken language.
Darwinian theory suggests that aesthetic sensitivity might have been an evolutionary advantage, helping early humans identify harmony in their environments.
But until recently, neuroscientists had little understanding of the underlying brain mechanisms governing our sense of musical beauty.
Previous research identified the orbitofrontal cortex, a region involved in reward and value assessment, as a key player in aesthetic experiences (Brown et al., 2011; Zatorre & Salimpoor, 2013).
However, most of these studies focused on localized activity rather than on dynamic brain networks. Dai et al. (2024) sought to bridge this gap by tracking changes in neural connectivity as participants listened to music they found beautiful—or not.
How They Did It: Piazzolla and fMRI
The researchers recruited 36 adults and had them lie inside an fMRI scanner while listening to Adiós Nonino, a composition by Astor Piazzolla known for its emotional peaks and valleys. A separate group of participants was asked to continuously rate the perceived beauty of the piece, allowing the researchers to identify specific passages that were consistently judged as beautiful versus non-beautiful.
Using Leading Eigenvector Dynamics Analysis (a technique as complex as its name suggests), the team analyzed how different brain regions communicated during beautiful and non-beautiful passages. The results were striking.
The Aesthetic Brain at Play
The researchers found 12 distinct patterns of brain connectivity while participants listened to the music. Three patterns showed significant differences between beautiful and non-beautiful passages:
Visual-Aesthetic Connectivity – When participants found the music beautiful, there was increased connectivity between visual regions of the brain, suggesting that musical beauty engages mental imagery. This aligns with prior research showing that beautiful music activates the default mode network, which is associated with imagination and introspection (Koelsch, 2014).
Primitive Auditory Processing – During non-beautiful passages, the brain showed heightened activity in the primary auditory cortex, indicating that it was more focused on processing sound at a fundamental level rather than engaging in aesthetic appreciation.
Emotion and Reward Circuitry – Beautiful music also engaged the orbitofrontal cortex, the ventral striatum, and the amygdala, reinforcing previous findings that aesthetic experiences involve emotional reward processing (Blood & Zatorre, 2001; Salimpoor et al., 2013).
Moreover, the researchers found that during beautiful music, the brain underwent more frequent state transitions—that is, it moved more dynamically between different network configurations. This suggests that aesthetic appreciation is not a static state but an active, fluid process.
Confirmations, Contradictions, and Curiosities
While this study strengthens our understanding of how music engages aesthetic brain networks, it is not without its limitations.
The sample size was relatively small, and the study focused on a single musical piece, raising questions about whether different genres (say, jazz vs. death metal) might engage different neural circuits.
Notably, previous studies have suggested that individual differences play a significant role in musical beauty perception.
For example, neuroimaging research has shown that trained musicians exhibit heightened connectivity between the auditory and reward systems compared to non-musicians (Zatorre & Salimpoor, 2013).
Additionally, cross-cultural studies indicate that aesthetic appreciation varies based on exposure and familiarity (Demorest et al., 2012).
Future Directions: Can Neuroscience Predict Hit Songs?
One tantalizing question remains: Could these findings be used to predict which songs will be commercially successful?
Research by Greenberg et al. (2016) suggests that musical preference is linked to personality traits, raising the possibility that AI-driven models could one day predict individual music tastes based on neural connectivity patterns.
If so, the future of music might be less about artistic vision and more about neuro-optimized composition—a concept oddly both exhilarating and dystopian.
The Poetry of Neural Symphonies
What emerges from this study is a vision of the brain as a dynamic orchestra, with different regions acting as musicians responding to the aesthetic conductor of beauty.
When we listen to music that moves us, our brains create vivid internal landscapes, engaging circuits involved in emotion, memory, and even vision.
While we may not yet fully understand why one person swoons over Bach while another prefers Beyoncé, we now know that musical beauty is more than just sound—it is an intricate interplay of neural harmonies. And that, as Asimov would say, is rather funny.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Blood, A. J., & Zatorre, R. J. (2001). Intensely pleasurable responses to music correlate with activity in brain regions implicated in reward and emotion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98(20), 11818-11823. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.191355898
Brown, S., Martinez, M. J., & Parsons, L. M. (2011). The neural basis of human dance. Cerebral Cortex, 21(6), 1156-1167. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhq141
Demorest, S. M., Morrison, S. J., Jungbluth, D., & Beken, M. (2012). Cross-cultural differences in melodic expectations. Music Perception, 30(2), 184-195. https://doi.org/10.1525/mp.2012.30.2.184
Greenberg, D. M., Baron-Cohen, S., Stillwell, D. J., Kosinski, M., & Rentfrow, P. J. (2016). Musical preferences are linked to cognitive styles. PLoS One, 11(7), e0156185. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0156185
Koelsch, S. (2014). Brain correlates of music-evoked emotions. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 15(3), 170-180. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn3666
Salimpoor, V. N., van den Bosch, I., Kovacevic, N., McIntosh, A. R., Dagher, A., & Zatorre, R. J. (2013). Interactions between the nucleus accumbens and auditory cortices predict music reward value. Science, 340(6129), 216-219. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1231059
Zatorre, R. J., & Salimpoor, V. N. (2013). From perception to pleasure: Music and its neural substrates. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(2), 10430-10437. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1301228110