Neurobiologists who spend their time measuring everything in the brain, studied this interesting process. New music gets to the ears and is then processed by the brain, as listening is really a neural experience.
If music is trite and too predictable by following a model we have already stored, it’s annoying, and many people will find it boring. But when we hear unexpected notes, notes that are out of the melodic pattern we are used to, an interesting series of events occurs. Some parts of the brain become very active,… it is as if the cortex was struggling to make sense of this new sound, to find this new order it doesn’t have yet. The emotion comes from all this desire to make sense of the music, from all this confusion when we think we have found a meaningful pattern that then fades away a little later. If the music is very good it will reveal itself only at the end, the emotion will rise from an unfulfilled expectation all along the listening experience, and the pleasure will grow from the anticipation of this fulfillment at the end.
To summarize, music that makes us actively looking for patterns, for a meaning, is much more interesting than music whose pattern is already discovered and explored.
Jonah Lehrer explained all this (among other subjects) in many more details and with a lot of talent, in his famous book ‘Proust Was a Neuroscientist’.
But there are so many questions left unanswered…. Why do people actually like trite music? Why are Celine Dion or any other artist singing trite music selling million of albums? Do some people have brains that don’t like to be challenged?
Also, once we have figured out the new pattern, the music is not unpredictable anymore, so why are we still listening to it and enjoying it years after having discovered it?
And it can become very complicated when we take into consideration each person’s background, an accomplished musician will obviously have much more patterns stored in his brain than the average Joe, and it will take much more to keep him interested.
Music continues to be a fascinating and extremely complex subject for neurobiologists to explore.