The sound of structure: fMRI reveals affective and cognitive mechanisms in coherent and disorganised music.

Music reflects a complex interplay between sensory, cognitive, and affective processing in the human brain. Using functional MRI, we investigated the neural mechanisms underlying music perception in one-hundred healthy participants by comparing responses to intact and temporally scrambled musical pieces. Through computational acoustic analyses, we demonstrated that scrambling disrupted global structure while preserving local features, which allowed us to assess how the brain extracts coherence from musical input. We observed that intact music recruited a fronto–striatal pathway associated with rhythm processing, affect and reward, while scrambled music engaged auditory areas implicated in perception, as well as a fronto-parietal and cerebellar network involved in cognitive control. Through linear mixed-effects modelling, we also showed that individual differences in musical aptitude, training, and emotional self-regulation influence music perception in default–mode and cognitive, but not reward areas. We observed a dissociation between musical training and aptitude indices within the angular gyrus, showing opposite responses to intact and scrambled music. Our findings suggest that coherent musical structure is critical in shaping musical affect, with implications for a better understanding of the role of individual differences.