Music

Why do humans take pleasure from sequences of tones? This question has perplexed many scientists and philosophers over the years. The great science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke (1953) went so far as to suggest that an alien race would be puzzled and astonished by the amount of time we spend listening to sounds that have no apparent purpose or utility. Yet, humans consistently rank music among the top ten things that bring pleasure, usually above such things as money, food, or art (Dubé and LeBel 2003). So why do temporally organized pitch sequences as found in music bring such pleasure? In the present chapter, we outline some of the critical mechanisms that make music both rewarding and motivating, and attempt to link these factors to recent neuroscientific insights into the networks that mediate reward.