HORROR AND BLISS: how the brain hears, feels, and fears music

Photo by Valentino Funghi on Unsplash

Our brain and music have a complicated relationship. As a rule, the brain adores «musical opium», responding to it much like it does to sex or gambling. Perhaps music helps it cope with entropy and predict the future. And it turns out, there is no greater pleasure for our brain than that!

MELOPHOBIA: MUSIC CAN BE TERRIFYING!

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here are people who understand music but don’t love it. They are composers. There are people who don’t understand music but love it. They are listeners. And there are people who neither understand nor love music. They are musicologists». These words were spoken by the great composer Igor Stravinsky, who disliked musicologists. However, regardless of their understanding of music, people who do not love and even fear it truly exist.

Moreover, music can provoke sheer panic. Melophobia is a severe mental disorder in which a person experiences overwhelming fear not only when hearing music but even when thinking about it. Scientists cannot reach a consensus on the causes of melophobia. Some, as usual, blame genetics; others, drug abuse among melophobes; still others point to environmental factors, middle ear pathologies, or negative mental and emotional experiences associated with music.

THEY’RE IMMUNE TO THE MUSICAL «OPIUM»

While melophobia is a rare and mysterious phenomenon, musical anhedonia is far more common. It’s a psychological condition in which a person can distinguish chords and understand the meaning of a song, yet feels no emotion at all while listening. Unlike anhedonics, most people experience music much like a drug, sex, alcohol, or gambling — it stimulates the nervous system, quickens the heartbeat, and increases sweating.

The pleasure derived from one’s favorite music is linked to the brain’s «reward system», which activates opioid receptors. The more opioid receptors you have, the stronger your reaction and your «musical reward». It is known that drugs can temporarily ease both physical and mental suffering. The brain’s opioid system also plays a role in pain relief. That’s why scientists are developing and refining methods to use music to manage pain and treat mental disorders.

VERY MUSICAL GENES

For people with musical anhedonia, music is not a «drug». The reason lies in a disrupted connection between the brain’s reward system and the auditory cortex. As a result, they experience pleasure from the same things as everyone else — except music! And musical anhedonics are not that rare: about 5.5% of the world’s population is completely insensitive to musical reward. Genetics, rather than upbringing, worldview, cultural tradition, or talent (though those certainly matter), plays a key role in how strongly we can derive pleasure from music.

If a piece of music gives you an emotional high and an irresistible urge to move to the rhythm, it’s not entirely your personal experience. It’s also part of the genetic code inherited from your ancestors. Moreover, the genes that influence musical reward differ from those responsible for sensitivity to other pleasures, and even from those that determine musical ability.

PLEASURE FROM «PREDICTABLE UNCERTAINTY»

So, was Stravinsky exaggerating — or not by much after all? Understanding, loving, and composing music are far from the same thing, even at the genetic level. German scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development have proven that the brains of professional musicians and ordinary listeners perceive music differently. For their experiment, they invited 20 participants — 10 of them professional musicians. Each was asked to listen three times to 10 short excerpts from Johann Sebastian Bach’s compositions while their brain activity was measured using electroencephalography.

It turned out that the brain not only tracks patterns in these compositions but also makes musical predictions, encoding the uncertainty of the melody in neural signals of different frequencies. This process increases brain activity and strengthens neural connections. However, in musicians and non-musicians, the signal encoding occurs in different frequency ranges. In the first group, the beta range (12–30 Hz), associated with action and planning, was more pronounced; in the second, the alpha range (8–12 Hz), linked to information processing and relaxation. The researchers suggested that this difference occurs because, for some, listening is hard work — while for others, it’s pure pleasure.

THE THEORY OF NEURAL RESONANCE

Scientists believe that the brain makes its complex musical predictions based on both content and timing. Brain rhythms physically resonate with music. It is this synchronization with sound that creates musical experience, movement, and meaning — shaping our sense of time and our instinctive urge to move in rhythm. In a sense, our brain «becomes music» itself, confirming the Neural Resonance Theory (NRT).

According to this theory, all higher nervous activity is nothing more than the resonance of oscillations between different brain networks and the external environment. Such oscillatory structures as pulse and harmony reflect stable resonance patterns within the brain. However, these patterns can be stable in different ways, which explains our attraction to consonance (harmonious combinations of sounds) and the difference in how we perceive major and minor keys.

WHEN WE SAY «BRAIN», WE MEAN «MUSIC»

The brains of all people, regardless of their musical experience, operate according to the same dynamic principles that determine how we hear and create music. For instance, even when perceiving the syncopated rhythms of Brazilian samba, the brain makes a musical prediction and «fills in» the missing beat. According to NRT, it is resonance that underlies the subjective feeling of «I am aware». And if that is true, then music may be capable of restoring our very «existential foundation».

For example, healing from stroke, Parkinson’s disease, or depression. Or aiding in the development of emotionally intelligent AI — one that can feel and create music like a human being. But even if that day is far ahead, music — this universal language of the Universe! — is already working wonders, uniting people across the world and restoring, amid wars and hostility, the timeless beauty and harmony of existence.

Original research: