Why do you like the music that you do? This is the question Dopr’s founders set out to answer in our music neuroscience research. This page provides an overview of the music neuroscience research behind Dopr’s predictive models.

It includes an overview of key findings, links to articles, specific music examples of Familiar Surprise, research blogs, and case studies.


<aside> 🎼 Overview

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<aside> 📄 Publications

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<aside> 📚 Case Studies

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Overview

How music leads to a pleasure response in the brain

In our research, we were the first to model and quantify optimal patterns of tension and release **in music, and show that they predict the dopamine pleasure response of music enjoyment.

Music is perceived through sensory (bottom-up) and cognitive (top-down) brain systems, which are shaped by listeners’ culture and experiences. Through statistical regularities in your environment and culture early in life, you develop rigid expectations about patterns within music. Although there is some debate, your expectations are set at a fairly young age (around 7 years old), about which sounds go together. When music deviates from expectations, your brain attends to this ‘surprise’, and it learns to make sense of this new information. Not all surprises are equal. Dopamine is both the pleasure and the learning molecule, and when done right, optimal surprise leads to music preference and increased dopamine.

Music can be described simply as an auditory stream of information transmitted through sound waves. It is somehow able, however, to tap into your emotional core. It is a universal language that can emote and express at a deeply primal level of our consciousness. The emotions music conjures are often explicitly linked to memories of significant events, people, adventures, revelations, triumphs, or tragedies in your life. Music is an associational cue for some of your strongest memories. Nostalgia and familiarity also lead to music preference and increased dopamine.

You get the most pleasure from music when it is statistically surprising yet explicitly familiar, and this is why we named this neuroscientific principle of music enjoyment ‘*Familiar Surprise’.*

<aside> 🧠 Familiar Surprise captures how your brain responds to tension (surprise) and release, within a context (familiarity) in music. Good music ‘hijacks’ both of your memory systems.

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Optimal Familiar Surprise can be calculated on several music features. Below are some examples: