Neural Correlates of Music Listening: Does the Music Matter?

Abstract

The last decades have seen a proliferation of music and brain studies, with a major focus on plastic changes as the outcome of continuous and prolonged engagement with music. Thanks to the advent of neuroaesthetics, research on music cognition has broadened its scope by considering the multifarious phenomenon of listening in all its forms, including incidental listening up to the skillful attentive listening of experts, and all its possible effects. These latter range from objective and sensorial effects directly linked to the acoustic features of the music to the subjectively affective and even transformational effects for the listener. Of special importance is the finding that neural activity in the reward circuit of the brain is a key component of a conscious listening experience. We propose that the connection between music and the reward system makes music listening a gate towards not only hedonia but also eudaimonia, namely a life well lived, full of meaning that aims at realizing one’s own “daimon” or true nature. It is argued, further, that music listening, even when conceptualized in this aesthetic and eudaimonic framework, remains a learnable skill that changes the way brain structures respond to sounds and how they interact with each other.

Ventral tegmental area dopaminergic action in music therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder: A literature review

“…This review supports that music serves as an effective approach for treating PTSD that is associated with VTA dopaminergic activation. It should be noted that music therapy affects various aspects of physiological functions, such as various other brain circuits [e.g., mPFC-amygdala neurocircuit (Koelsch, 2014 ; Reybrouck et al, 2021 )], neurotransmitters [e.g., oxytocin (Beck et al, 2018a ; Harvey, 2020 )], and immunological responsiveness [e.g., the reaction of the HPA axis (Reybrouck et al, 2018 ; Pant et al, 2022 )], in addition to dopaminergic activities. Whether and how these different factors coordinate with VTA dopaminergic tone to treat PTSD symptoms warrants further investigation.…”

Book Review: Musical Bodies, Musical Minds. Enactive Cognitive Science and the Meaning of Human Musicality by Dylan van der Schyff, Andrea Schiavio, and David J. Elliott

“…Some chapters are rather abstract and difficult to read, others are also somewhat polemic, especially when discussing issues of music education as aesthetic education, and digressions about ethical music education and existential implications, though this does no harm. More references to recent findings in the domain of neuroesthetics, however, should have been welcomed here (Brattico, 2020; Chatterjee, 2010, Chatterjee & Vartanian, 2016; Leder, 2013; Pearce et al, 2016; Reybrouck et al, 2021). The authors, moreover, are passionate in their attempts to provide the much-needed theoretical and empirical grounding for the field of music education.…”

Musical Enjoyment and Reward: From Hedonic Pleasure to Eudaimonic Listening

“…It can be questioned to what extent these neurobiological mechanisms are adaptive in a beneficial sense. There is, in fact, the possibility of adaptive and maladaptive listening with listening behaviors that may possibly be related to maladaptive response styles [43,190]. The latter might be the case for listening to music for mood regulation when there is no real enjoyment of the music or when no psychological benefits are obtained from listening [191,192].…”