The Sound of (Unexpected) Music

Music is an art form we are all bound to discover, it is all around us. It can be a blessing in disguise – an auditory experience, fulfilling our pursuit for peace in an arrhythmic journey of life. From the sound waves that are perceived by our eardrums, to these waves being converted into an auditory stimulus, to the complex network of neurons that get activated by them, the entire process of listening to music has been studied to understand its effects on our brains. 

Listening to music and immersing yourself in it is an aesthetic experience. Focusing attention on music becomes a cognitively engaging activity [1]. The music we listen to has unique tones, pitches, and beats. It usually consists of recognizable patterns of notes that are meant to flow into each other and create anticipation. We often find that these patterns repeat themselves regularly throughout the entire duration of the song, making it easier for us to catch on to the beat!  

Although, do the patterns have to be regular for us to enjoy music?   

Have you ever listened to or liked atonal music? It’s the type of music with no tonal centre, or the absence of functional harmony (sound of two or more notes heard simultaneously). In simpler terms, the sound heard is not in tone as it has two or more notes that break the anticipated pattern [2].   

To give you a clearer idea of what the difference between tonal and atonal music is, here’s a video from YouTube that gives you a practical example! 

Atonal Music presents listeners with a highly uncertain auditory environment. The aesthetic appreciation gained from it might vary from person to person depending upon how open an individual is to accepting its listening pattern. Studying our appreciation of atonality in music could be a promising tool to discover how unwanted experiences avoided in everyday situations could be enjoyed in an aesthetic context [3].  

We find pleasure in listening to music when the reward systems of the brain are activated. Although we find certain pieces of music more appealing than others. Have you ever wondered why this preferentially activation of the reward centres of the brain takes place?  

In a study by Scott A Miles, scientists conducted a statistical investigation of surprise in the harmonic structure of songs that reached the Billboard Hot 100 between the years of 1958 and 1991¹. The goal of this study was to learn more about how the brain processes music, by examining the structure of music that is preferred. Within information theory, surprise is a mathematical measure of how much an event deviates from expectations.  

Before this study there were two hypotheses which try to explain what patterns might affect our enjoyment of music [4] - 

Absolute-Surprise Hypothesis: This hypothesis states that unexpected events in music lead to pleasure. Surprises are considered to be a good thing for the listener as dopamine has been associated with novelty-seeking behaviour [5]. Therefore, it is possible that the processing of harmonically surprising sections of music releases dopamine and thus makes such music a rewarding experience for us. 

Contrastive-Surprise Hypothesis: This hypothesis is based on the premise that surprises are bad for a listener's experience. Studies have shown that in isolation, harmonically unexpected events in music are processed by the brain in a way similar to syntactic errors in language [4]. However, this hypothesis states that the juxtaposition of sections of unexpected events with sections of expected events, leads to a more rewarding experience. 

In the study, it was discovered that the songs higher on the list (the more preferred songs) had more surprising chords than those at the bottom. It was also true that songs within top-quartile of the chart varied more in their average surprise than the those within bottom-quartile. This means that the songs that people prefer don’t necessarily always have more surprises, but rather they prefer listening to a blend of songs with higher and lower levels of surprise. 

The results seemed to align with both the Absolute-Surprise and the Contrastive-Surprise Hypothesis. Both absolute and contrastive forms of surprise can be pleasurable. Perhaps, each of these forms is advantageous under different conditions. Scientists proposed a new hypothesis which states that both can play a part in the activation of the reward centres of our brain while listening to music. It was called the Hybrid - Surprise Hypothesis!  

The next time you listen to music – maybe have a think about it? How much do you enjoy the element of unexpectedness in music? 

As a society that’s neurally wired to run on emotions, music is a very important aspect of our lives because it has the power to truly move us. Research on music cognition is extremely broad in its scope and usually falls under neuromusicology and neuroaesthetics. These fields have the potential to not just help us better understand our taste in music and why we like the songs that we do, but also to discover new ways in which it can help us. 

FUN ACTIVITY FOR YOU TO TRY!!  

To test your own preferences, you could make a list of your Top 10 favourite songs and print out their chord sheets. Now analyse them to see if they have more,  

repetitive patterns of chords, or 

a blend of repetitive patterns and surprises 

Using 10 songs was just a suggestion, you can do this for as many of your favourite songs as you want to increase the sample size and explore the type of listener you are! Feel free to take the help of a friend if you don’t know how to read chord sheets! 🙂 

- Nithish G S, Guest Author  

Founder’s note: 

Sometimes we think reducing music into its components is too reductionist. Whether or not we can understand music by breaking it down into its constituent pieces is perhaps debatable, but I always find that such a reductionist approach gives me insight into my own cognitive process. Why do I like this music? Is it because of the unexpected element in it? Or perhaps because of the emotion it invokes? Or the memory associated with it? It’s like peeling back layers, each one revealing a new aspect of my thinking and experiential process!    

References: 

Brain Connectivity Networks and the Aesthetic Experience of Music 

Predictions and the brain: how musical sounds become rewarding 

Atonal Music: Can Uncertainty Lead to Pleasure? 

A Statistical Analysis of the Relationship between Harmonic Surprise and Preference in Popular Music 

Dopamine D2 Receptors in the Insular Cortex and the Personality Trait of Novelty Seeking 

Banner Image: The last chords of Schoenberg's "George Lieder". An example of a chord which counts as a 'surprise' and makes the music atonal.