What makes a musical piece enjoyable?

Researchers
Norberto Grzywacz, Hassan Aleem,
Scott Miles, Jiaan Mansuri, and David Rosen

When a person listens to a pleasant musical piece, the enjoyment stems from the individual’s aesthetic values.  Similarly, most musicians and composers use their aesthetic values in their work.  We have studied these values by analyzing the statistics of successful music and by performing auditory psychophysical studies.  These studies have shown that harmonic surprise is key in the success of popular music and that what constitutes surprise varies over time as musical culture evolves.  We have also studied the role of temporal prediction in successful rhythms.