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Much of what we know and love about music hinges on our ability to make successful predictions, which appears to be an intrinsically rewarding process. Yet the exact process by which learned predictions become pleasurable is unclear. Here we created novel melodies in an alternative scale different from any established musical culture to show how musical preference is generated de novo. Across nine studies ( n = 1,185), adult participants learned to like more frequently presented items that adhered to this rapidly learned structure, suggesting that exposure and prediction errors both affected self-report liking ratings. Learning trajectories varied by music-reward sensitivity but were similar for U.S. and Chinese participants. Furthermore, functional MRI activity in auditory areas reflected prediction errors, whereas functional connectivity between auditory and medial prefrontal regions reflected both exposure and prediction errors. Collectively, results support predictive coding as a cognitive mechanism by which new musical sounds become rewarding. 

Human imagination is generative and creative yet deeply rooted in culture and familiarity. Recent studies have quantified the effects of culture on stories that are imagined during music listening, but the music used in previous work was always drawn from a tradition familiar to participants from at least one of the cultures. Here we report the first study of imagined stories to music written in a musical system that is novel to participants from each culture, thus allowing for a direct comparison of narratives prompted by the same set of excerpts that is comparably unfamiliar to both groups. Music composed in the Bohlen–Pierce scale was presented to participants from two geographically defined cultures: Boston, United States and Beijing, China. We also examined how individual differences, such as in musicality and sensitivity to musical reward, might affect narrative engagement and semantic content of the imagined stories as measured by tools from natural language processing. Results showed that semantic spaces of music-evoked imaginings differed between Boston and Beijing cohorts. While both cultures were similarly engaged by the story response task, differences emerged in the semantic content of the imagined stories. Boston participants who reported being more absorbed by music wrote more unconventional stories, whereas Beijing participants who reported more emotional responses to music wrote more conventional stories. These results reveal the roles of culture and individual differences in modes of narrative engagement and imagination during music listening. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)