Emotional responses to pleasant and unpleasant music correlate with activity in paralimbic brain regions

@article{Blood1999EmotionalRT,
  title={Emotional responses to pleasant and unpleasant music correlate with activity in paralimbic brain regions},
  author={Anne J. Blood and Robert J. Zatorre and Patrick Bermudez and Alan C. Evans},
  journal={Nature Neuroscience},
  year={1999},
  volume={2},
  pages={382-387}
}
Neural correlates of the often-powerful emotional responses to music are poorly understood. Here we used positron emission tomography to examine cerebral blood flow (CBF) changes related to affective responses to music. Ten volunteers were scanned while listening to six versions of a novel musical passage varying systematically in degree of dissonance. Reciprocal CBF covariations were observed in several distinct paralimbic and neocortical regions as a function of dissonance and of perceived… 
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Intensely pleasurable responses to music correlate with activity in brain regions implicated in reward and emotion

  • A. BloodR. Zatorre
  • Psychology, Biology
    Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
  • 2001
TLDR
This finding links music with biologically relevant, survival-related stimuli via their common recruitment of brain circuitry involved in pleasure and reward.

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Functional neuroimaging with parametric analyses based on the intensity of felt emotions reveal a differentiated recruitment across emotions of networks involved in reward, memory, self-reflective, and sensorimotor processes, which may account for the unique richness of musical emotions.

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The resultant emotion-related component activations that were less interfered by the activities from other brain processes complement previous EEG studies of emotion perception to music.

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Empirical support is provided for the proposal that change in basic musical features is a fundamental trigger of emotional responses in listeners.

Investigating emotion with music: An fMRI study

TLDR
In all of the mentioned structures, except the hippocampus, activations increased over time during the presentation of the musical stimuli, indicating that the effects of emotion processing have temporal dynamics; the temporal dynamics have so far mainly been neglected in the functional imaging literature.

Temporal dynamics of musical emotions examined through intersubject synchrony of brain activity.

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The results reveal synchronous activations in left amygdala, left insula and right caudate nucleus that were associated with higher arousal, whereas positive valence ratings correlated with decreases in amygdala and caUDate activity.

Pleasurable emotional response to music: A case of neurodegenerative generalized auditory agnosia

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The case of a young man with auditory agnosia as the consequence of cortical neurodegeneration who continues to experience pleasure when exposed to music is presented, with implications for the evolving understanding of music perception, music misperception, music memory, and music-associated emotion.
...

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