Scaling behaviour in music and cortical dynamics interplay to mediate music listening pleasure (original) (raw)

neuromagnetic brain activity display 1/f β scaling under rest 25-28 and music 29. Self-similarity further characterises the heartbeat variations 30 and such dynamical organization of the nervous system is functionally relevant 17,31-33. Humans can apprehend recursive fractal rules embedded in tone sequences 34 , predict 1/f better than random tempo fluctuations 35 and, a preferential cortical tracking of tones occurs when its pitches display long-range temporal correlations 36. Furthermore, electrophysiological evidence suggests humans process long-distance dependencies typical of music syntax 37. Altogether, it led us to hypothesise that the scaling of music shapes the neuronal scaling behaviour during listening and to posit that the brain's sensitivity to music-and the pleasure derived from listening-lies in their shared similar dynamical complex properties 38. Here, we characterise the self-similarity of fluctuations in loudness, pitch, and rhythm of 12 classical pieces (Fig. 1b,c) and analyse the scaling behaviour of multiscale neuronal activity from different scalp regions (Fig. 1d,e) and cardiac interbeat intervals (Fig. 1f) of healthy individuals-at baseline and during music listening-and associate self-reported pleasure with these measures (see also Table 1).

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