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Music, deeply ingrained in human culture since prehistoric times, has been a source of reward for people in every society. 

In a recent study, researchers explored the processes that govern how the brain processes and derives pleasure from music. Central to the study were chord progressions extracted from commercially successful pop songs, forming the backbone of numerous musical compositions.

The McGill Billboard dataset, a repository of over 80,000 chords from 745 pop songs, provided a rich source for these progressions. The selected chord progressions transposed to the key of C major were played using marimba, jazz guitar and acoustic guitar timbres.

They found that musical pleasure arises from two primary sources: sensory expectations, rooted in the auditory experience of music, and cognitive expectations, shaped by the learned understanding of musical patterns.

The research included two distinct experiments. The first involved both musicians and non-musicians, requiring participants to rate their surprise at each chord. The second, with a broader participant pool, focused on rating the pleasantness of each chord, while the researchers looked into emotional responses tied to expectancy and surprise.

Results indicated that both sensory and cognitive elements independently contributed to the surprise ratings in the first experiment, with cognitive aspects playing a more prominent role, especially among musicians. In the second experiment, both sensory and cognitive expectations independently predicted the pleasantness of chords, emphasizing their distinct roles in influencing musical enjoyment.

The study suggests a dual system in the brain, where higher-level cognitive processes and lower-level sensory experiences collaboratively shape musical expectations and pleasure. The unexpected additive contribution of cognitive and sensory surprise underscores the complexity of how the brain processes music.

While the study provides valuable insights, researchers acknowledged the limitations, particularly in the applicability of computational models to gather information about the intricacies of human musical processing. The focus on Western pop music chord progressions also prompts questions about the generalizability of the findings to other musical genres or cultural contexts.