Fronto-temporal theta phase-synchronization underlies music-evoked pleasantness

Highlights

• The pleasurable experience associated with music listening emerges from right fronto-temporal loops.

• Theta oscillations underlie the right fronto-temporal interactions involved in music-reward processing.

• Bayesian methods provide a robust alternative to studying highly dimensional phasesynchronization data.

Abstract

Listening to pleasant music engages a complex distributed network including pivotal areas for auditory, reward, emotional and memory processing. On the other hand, frontal theta rhythms appear to be relevant in the process of giving value to music. However, it is not clear to which extent this oscillatory mechanism underlies the brain interactions that characterize music-evoked pleasantness and its related processes. The goal of the present experiment was to study brain synchronization in this oscillatory band as a function of music-evoked pleasantness. EEG was recorded from 25 healthy subjects while they were listening to music and rating the experienced degree of induced pleasantness. By using a multilevel Bayesian approach we found that phase synchronization in the theta band between right temporal and frontal signals increased with the degree of pleasure experienced by participants. These results show that slow fronto-temporal loops play a key role in music-evoked pleasantness.