Discrete cortical regions associated with the musical beauty of major and minor chords

Abstract

Previous research has demonstrated that the degree of aesthetic pleasure a person experiences correlates with the activation of reward functions in the brain. However, it is unclear whether different affective qualities and the perceptions of beauty that they evoke correspond to specific areas of brain activation. Major and minor musical keys induce two types of affective qualities--bright/happy and dark/sad--that both evoke aesthetic pleasure. In the present study, we used positron emission tomography to demonstrate that the two musical keys (major and minor) activate distinct brain areas. Minor consonant chords perceived as beautiful strongly activated the right striatum, which has been assumed to play an important role in reward and emotion processing, whereas major consonant chords perceived as beautiful induced significant activity in the left middle temporal gyrus, which is believed to be related to coherent and orderly information processing. These results suggest that major and minor keys, both of which are perceived as beautiful, are processed differently in the brain.

Music, feelings, and the human brain.

“…Musical stimuli with positive valence and low arousal, for example, those leading to tenderness, increases activity in the right ventral striatum, whereas musical stimuli with high valence and arousal, such as those leading to joy, are correlated with increased activity in the left ventral striatum. Activation of the ventral striatum in relation to pleasant music listening was also observed in fMRI studies by (Menon & Levitin, 2005) and , and in PET studies (Brown et al, 2004 andSuzuki et al, 2008).…”

The perception of harmonic triads: an fMRI study

“…Despite the fact that both types of chord are subjectively perceived as "unstable" ("rough," "dissonant," "not beautiful," etc. ), relative to major or minor chords, the dissonant chords produced activation in the right parietal lobe (see, also, Suzuki et al 2008), whereas the tension chords activated bilateral frontal cortex (RH > LH). Having thus established the reality of a distinction between interval dissonance and triadic tension in terms of brain activation, the present experiment was undertaken to identify the sites involved in the three distinct forms of non-dissonant harmony (major, minor, and amodal tension).…”

Estimation of Brain Activities in Response to Major and Minor Triads and Scales by FMRI

“…The response to minor chords in the insular cortex may be linked with the contribution of the region to emotional consequence to pain sensation [6]. The responses in the inferior frontal gyrus and the middle frontal gyrus may be related to the responses to dissonance reported in [5] as minor chords are more dissonant than major chords.…”

“…Then why does a minor piece sound sad or dark? To answer the question, many works have been done to measure brain activities while listening to major and minor pieces and also to major, minor and other chords [1][2][3][4][5]. However, to our knowledge, there seems to be no work on brain activities to major and minor scales, the building blocks for making melodies.…”

“…5 Brain regions showing more activation in response to minor chords than to major chords (p < 0.005, uncorrected) yielded by a random effect analysis of the data from 13 subjects.…”