How does our brain recognize a sound (musical or otherwise) as pleasant?
In: Biology
Youre question is very broad but ill give a few answers for wat i think ure looking for.
I make music and mix songs and usually the unpleasant sounds are the ones with unbalanced harmonics (very high frequencies at a very narrow range which makes them piercing) another thing, if you ever heard the mock emergency warnings or idk what their called (when a country is going through an emergency and your phone keeps playing that alarm sound)they usually play notes that carries lots of tension (these are ones where ur brain is expecting to hear a more stable tension free note afterwards) and never play any stable notes and it just goes back and forth between abt 2 notes only usually (this is my analysis of the alarms i could be wrong)
So, unbalanced frequencies range, tense/unstable notes would give u these unpleasant sounds ure talking abt. There could other things that i havent mentioned as well maybe like timbre(texture of the sound)
Our brains dread anything we dont recognize or never heard before, so if you play some synth and it sounds scary chances are because its an unfamiliar sound that u cant relate anything to
Edit: i misread the title i thought u wrote “unpleasant” same things apply the other way around tho. should be a viable answer regardless
A basic idea is harmonics. Sounds are made of waves. The amplitude of the wave determines how loud it is, while the frequency of the wave determines it’s pitch. The frequency of the wave also determines it’s wavelength, literally how long the wave actually is. When multiple sounds are played together, the combined waveform still has all of the shapes of the underlying inside it, just layered atop each other. If a wave is layered atop a wave twice as long as it, it’s called a harmonic and it sounds really good to our ears because the waveforms line up nicely. Generally speaking waves that have simple whole numbers ratios in wavelengths tend to sound good together because of this. If their waveforms are not multiples of each other, it tends to sound bad together, getting worse as they get closer to those nice whole number ratios.
We humans are primed for pattern recognition. If we weren’t, we would have never puzzled out that when certain patterns of stars (constellations) were in the sky, it was the ideal time to plant certain crops. When we recognize patters, there’s a certain satisfaction to it. A flower is beautiful because the pedals follow a certain pattern. A note by itself isn’t all that interesting, but notes arranged to make a pattern can be pleasant. This is very much influenced by what we’ve already heard because that shapes what we expect to ‘come next’ in a song. A song that’s a hit in the west will very likely fall flat in the east due to our different expectations.
Too much of a pattern can become repetitive and uninteresting though. If the same constellations were in the sky all the time, there would be no benefit to recognizing their pattern, so our brains are primed to filter out too much repetition as meaningless noise. Crafting a good song is all about balancing the right mix of expected and unexpected notes.
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