Abstract: Musical pleasure is the most common psychological phenomenon in music activities. Here, recent work on the neural substrates of musical pleasure has been reviewed, and we conclude that the experience of musical pleasure is related to activities of the brain reward system and interactions between the nucleus accumbens and other cortical regions (e.g., the auditory cortex). Especially, the dopaminergic transmission plays a causal role in this experience. Furthermore, the induction of musical pleasure can be explained by reward prediction errors and the information-theoretic model from the perspective of expectation. Future studies should further examine the function of the nucleus accumbens and other cortical regions in the induction of musical pleasure and integrate different expectation theories.

Key words: musical pleasure, emotional experience, reward, expectation, musical anhedonia