Schedule of Events | Symposia

Exposure to statistical regularities in music influences preference for novel melodies

Poster Session D - Monday, March 31, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Alberto Ara Romero¹, Marie-Eve Lisak¹, Neomi Singer², Josep Marco-Pallarés³, Robert J. Zatorre¹; ¹McGill University - MNI (Montreal, Canada), ²Sagol Brain Institute (Tel Aviv, Israel), ³University of Barcelona (Barcelona, Spain)

Music reward has been described as emerging from the predictive dynamics that characterize perception. When listening to music, bottom-up signals interact with top-down predictions and in the presence of a mismatch, surprise signals are generated and assigned value. The nature of these predictions is two-fold: veridical expectations are based on familiarity with specific materials, while schematic expectations are based on regularities learned across different materials. While experimental results about the effect of veridical expectations on music reward are extensive, empirical evidence for the effect of schematic expectations is lacking, with most investigators relying on theoretical assumptions. In this experiment we studied whether incidental learning of regularities in music does indeed influence preference for novel materials representative of said regularities. We modified the statistical contingencies that characterize Western music to create two artificial musical grammars. Participants were exposed to novel melodies representative of either grammar in a counterbalanced design. Before and after exposure, participants completed a two-alternative forced-choice task with counterbalanced materials where on each trial they decided on their preference between novel melodies representative of either grammar. We expected an increase in preference for the target grammar after exposure. Overall, we observed a significant increase in preference for the target musical grammar after exposure, independent of baseline preference. Furthermore, computational modeling of the responses with an ideal observer process corroborated the findings. These results empirically confirm theoretical accounts that musical pleasure emerges from predictive dynamics based on schematic expectations. The neural underpinnings that may underlie this phenomenon will be discussed.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotion-cognition interactions