For us humans, one of the most common, universal activities dealing with sounds and a highly common source of pleasure in daily life consists in music listening. When, as scientists, we observe musical behaviour and its related affective connotations, though, what becomes immediately evident is their high variability among individuals and across cultures.

Sounds in music acquire sense, namely, show a sort of internal “formal perfection” – paraphrasing Cochrane (2011) – when their parts relate to each other in some kind of structured and organized way. This organization is dictated by each musical culture and by its historically established conventions (e.g., Western tonal music, pentatonic Arabic music and so on). Hence, sounds make sense in idiosyncratic ways across societies. They even acquire different meanings across individuals within the same musical culture or within the same individuals across time. Such semantic instability and uncertainty for music is what makes it more a form of art than a cognitive function. For instance, the same rough vocal timbre of a heavy rock singer might give chills of pleasure to one aficionado and be totally repulsive for a classical music lover. Or else, the same song can be meaningless for one person or be of utmost importance to another, representing strong desires and values of the inner self or transporting to the dearest memories of one's own life.

The semantic variability and ambiguity of music across and within societies are the reasons why the scientific study of music perception and appreciation is challenging up to fall into a risk of reductionism when the musical experience gets identified with strictly perceptual or cognitive processes related to the brain processing of specific syntactic rules or their violations. Lately, to overcome the risk of reductionism and encompass the phenomenological richness of music, scholars have proposed a new research agenda, the neuroaesthetics of music, to investigate the neuroscientific foundations of music listening as an aesthetic experience, fractionating it into perceptual, cognitive, emotional and evaluative processes similarly to those occurring for other forms of arts (painting, literature, dance, and so on; Brattico, 2021; (Hodges, 2016, Stark et al., 2018)). Within this research agenda, several factors are considered to explain the individual variations in the musical experience. A very recent proposal by Thomson and colleagues (2023) identifies three main ways in which individuals engage with music and appreciate it: first, understanding and internalizing the musical structure; second, activating self-oriented responses to the music that reinforce the sense of self and impact on well-being (e.g., by activating autobiographical memories); third, identifying and engaging with the sources of music making, including the biomechanical way a piece is performed as well as its cultural, historical and even political context.

Neuroscientific research on music has much advanced, including within the neuroaesthetics agenda; however, the largest focus has been on the first source of music engagement and appreciation as identified by Thompson et al. (Thompson et al., 2023), namely understanding and internalising the musical structure, and more precisely, one specific type of musical structure, i.e., Western tonal music. The reason for such emphasis can be found in the Western geographical origin of the researchers and in the initial motivations for investigating Western classical musicians as a good cognitive and neuroscience model for, respectively, expertise and brain plasticity (for a brief history of the field, cf. Brattico, 2021). However, a musical meaning can emerge even in the presence of highly complex, indefinite sounds, and this meaning formation process might be affected by the constant process of learning by exposure to the environment. A small body of neuroimaging research has very recently focused on the contemporary style of atonal music, exploiting its richness and unpredictability to understand how the brain deals with the cognitive uncertainty of the auditory environment, in the theoretical framework of the predictive coding model (PCM) of music (Vuust et al., 2022).