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Atonal Music: Can Uncertainty Lead to Pleasure?

ABSTRACT: In recent years, the field of neuroaesthetics has gained considerable attention with music being a favored object of study. The majority of studies concerning music have, however, focused on the experience of Western tonal music (TM), which is characterized by tonal hierarchical organization, a high degree of consonance, and a tendency to provide the listener with a tonic as a reference point during the listening experience. We argue that a narrow focus on Western TM may have led to a one-sided view regarding the qualities of the aesthetic experience of music since Western art music from the 20th and 21st century like atonal music (AM) - while lacking a tonal hierarchical structure, and while being highly dissonant and hard to predict - is nevertheless enjoyed by a group of avid listeners. We propose a research focus that investigates, in particular, the experience of AM as a novel and compelling way with which to enhance our understanding of both the aesthetic appreciation of music and the role of predictive models in the context of musical pleasure. We use music theoretical analysis and music information retrieval methods to demonstrate how AM presents the listener with a highly uncertain auditory environment. Specifically, an analysis of a corpus of 100 musical segments is used to illustrate how tonal classical music and AM differ quantitatively in terms of both key and pulse clarity values. We then examine person related, extrinsic and intrinsic factors, that point to potential mechanisms underlying the appreciation and pleasure derived from AM. We argue that personality traits like "openness to experience," the framing of AM as art, and the mere exposure effect are key components of such mechanisms. We further argue that neural correlates of uncertainty estimation could represent a central mechanism for engaging with AM and that such contexts engender a comparatively weak predictive model in the listener. Finally we argue that in such uncertain contexts, correct predictions may be more subjectively rewarding than prediction errors since they signal to the individual that their predictive model is improving.

SUBMITTER: Mencke I

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6331456 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Atonal Music: Can Uncertainty Lead to Pleasure?

Mencke Iris I Omigie Diana D Wald-Fuhrmann Melanie M Brattico Elvira E

Frontiers in neuroscience 20190108

In recent years, the field of neuroaesthetics has gained considerable attention with music being a favored object of study. The majority of studies concerning music have, however, focused on the experience of Western tonal music (TM), which is characterized by tonal hierarchical organization, a high degree of consonance, and a tendency to provide the listener with a tonic as a reference point during the listening experience. We argue that a narrow focus on Western TM may have led to a one-sided ...[more]

PMID: 30670941

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Project description:The present literature review investigated how pleasure induced by music and visual-art has been conceptually understood in empirical research over the past 20 years. After an initial selection of abstracts from seven databases (keywords: pleasure, reward, enjoyment, and hedonic), twenty music and eleven visual-art papers were systematically compared. The following questions were addressed: (1) What is the role of the keyword in the research question? (2) Is pleasure considered a result of variation in the perceiver's internal or external attributes? (3) What are the most commonly employed methods and main variables in empirical settings? Based on these questions, our critical integrative analysis aimed to identify which themes and processes emerged as key features for conceptualizing art-induced pleasure. The results demonstrated great variance in how pleasure has been approached: In the music studies pleasure was often a clear object of investigation, whereas in the visual-art studies the term was often embedded into the context of an aesthetic experience, or used otherwise in a descriptive, indirect sense. Music studies often targeted different emotions, their intensity or anhedonia. Biographical and background variables and personality traits of the perceiver were often measured. Next to behavioral methods, a common method was brain imaging which often targeted the reward circuitry of the brain in response to music. Visual-art pleasure was also frequently addressed using brain imaging methods, but the research focused on sensory cortices rather than the reward circuit alone. Compared with music research, visual-art research investigated more frequently pleasure in relation to conscious, cognitive processing, where the variations of stimulus features and the changing of viewing modes were regarded as explanatory factors of the derived experience. Despite valence being frequently applied in both domains, we conclude, that in empirical music research pleasure seems to be part of core affect and hedonic tone modulated by stable personality variables, whereas in visual-art research pleasure is a result of the so called conceptual act depending on a chosen strategy to approach art. We encourage an integration of music and visual-art into to a multi-modal framework to promote a more versatile understanding of pleasure in response to aesthetic artifacts.

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Atonal Music: Can Uncertainty Lead to Pleasure?

Publications

Atonal Music: Can Uncertainty Lead to Pleasure?

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