Because the brain habituates to repeated sounds it rewards discovering something new. This is why a good composer outfits repeated lyrics, harmonies or melodies with variations and surprises. To paraphrase Daniel Levitin, we take pleasure in matching mental beats with a real-in-the-world beats but, at the same time, the brain takes delight when a skillful musician violates an expectation in an arousing way. One hallmark of good music, therefore, is a balance between familiarity and novelty; it builds and fulfills expectations while incorporating surprises. The details of Huron’s theory are summarized by his ITPRA model, which states the pleasure any music elicits is grounded in five distinct emotional responses: Imagination, Tension, Prediction, Reaction, and Appraisal. The pleasure of music – the surprise, the tension, the comfort, the “chills,” the resolution – is simply the musician “[tapping] into these primordial functions to produce a wealth of compelling emotional experiences.”
The takeaway from Huron’s research is that the psychological processes music engages are grounded in evolved cognitive mechanisms. It follows that despite the fact that listeners enjoy a wide variety of genres and musicians, all music engages the same general cognitive processes. Thus, there are certain arrangements of sounds no brain will enjoy and every brain will enjoy.
Can someone’s music taste be “wrong?” In his last piece of philosophical writing, “Of the Standards of Taste,” David Hume clarifies that a sentiment is how people feel when they perceive art and it is neither right nor wrong because “it has a reference to nothing beyond itself.” To that end, subjective preferences in music are real and they cannot be “right,” “wrong,” “good” or “bad”. But someone can be wrong about what sounds the brain finds intrinsically pleasurable. […] Proclaiming that “I like song x” is uncontroverted. But saying “song x is good” is shifting from a subjective preference to a claim about how the brain processes music and what elements of music it finds inherently pleasing. It’s possible to be wrong about in this regard, and research from Huron, Levitin and others provides the evidence.