“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”
— Aldous Huxley
There’s a particular satisfaction that comes from hearing a melody. We feel it in our breath, in a shiver that runs down our spine, in goosebumps that run across our forearms and the back of our neck. Why does music move us like this? Why can a simple shift in harmony spark joy, longing, or even grief?
To understand this, we need to see the brain as a prediction machine, always guessing at what comes next.
At the heart of how we perceive the world is something called predictive processing. The brain constantly builds models of what it expects to happen and then checks those models against the sensory input coming in. It’s not just passively receiving information; it’s actively predicting. That holds true for listening too. When we hear music, our auditory cortex is already running ahead, trying to guess the next note, the next chord, the shape of the melody. Each note we hear either confirms or challenges that guess.
This dance between what we expect and what actually happens is where music’s emotional power comes from. A well-written piece of music finds that sweet spot between what’s familiar and what’s new, feeding our brain’s need for structure while keeping us curious. When a chord resolves the way we thought it would, it’s satisfying. When that resolution is delayed or twisted in a new way, it creates tension, even yearning. These feelings aren’t just abstract. They’re deeply chemical.
Dopamine, the neurotransmitter tied to reward and motivation, plays a big role here. Research shows that those moments in music that make us hold our breath, like the pause before a chorus, the silence before a final chord resolves, are tied to a surge of dopamine in parts of the brain like the nucleus accumbens and the ventral tegmental area. What’s interesting is that the dopamine release often happens before the resolution itself. It’s not just the payoff we’re after; it’s the anticipation.
Some fascinating studies have used real songs to prove this point. In one study by Salimpoor and colleagues, researchers played classical pieces like Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings to test how listeners responded to moments of musical tension and release. They found that the biggest dopamine hits came just before the music reached its emotional climax. In another experiment, the Beatles’ Yesterday and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons were used to show that even familiar melodies can light up the reward centers of the brain when they align with our predictions—or break them in just the right way.
In that way, music is a reflection of how we think. Life, too, is made of guesses and expectations, about what will happen, how people will act, what might come next. Like music, life is full of patterns. Some are fulfilled, some are broken. Our brains are wired to find meaning in those patterns, to keep track of where we are in the “song” of our own lives. Music lets us hear that architecture out loud.
The auditory cortex is an especially fast learner when it comes to music. Over time, it builds more and more detailed models of tonality, phrasing, and cultural nuance. That’s why a jazz cadence might sound unfinished to someone raised on Western classical music, or why an Indian raga can evoke powerful emotions for those who grew up with it. Our musical expectations come from experience, but they’re also rooted in that universal system of prediction.
Listening to music is more than just hearing. It’s the brain stretching its predictive muscles in the most beautiful way. A melody is a map of possibility. Harmony is the tension between what we expect and what might surprise us. And in the constant dance between anticipation and fulfillment, the brain learns about more than just sound. It learns about itself.
