Music as a form of art: Current findings and challenges of music neuroaesthetics research.

Abstract

In recent decades, empirical research on music, often grouped under the label of cognitive neuroscience of music, has approached music primarily as a biological, cognitive faculty, focusing on audiomotor predictive and reward mechanisms. More recently, the neuroaesthetics of music has expanded this focus to musical experience as a situated encounter with music as a performing art. From this viewpoint, three complementary accounts of musical experience can be distinguished: an audiomotor-reward account, closely linked to cognitive neuroscience and centered on prediction, reward and auditory-striatal connectivity; an appreciative-evaluative account, in which liking, being moved, and meaning can emerge without an explicit aesthetic stance; and an aesthetic-artistic account, involving reflective judgments of beauty, novelty, and artistic significance. We review recent advances in naturalistic listening, experimental concert research, and hyperscanning, showing how they move the field beyond isolated sounds toward culturally, socially, and bodily embedded musical events. Finally, we identify a theoretical challenge: future research should explain how musical experiences become meaningful, shared, and potentially transformative across diverse, non-elitist, and non-Western-centered contexts.