Overview

• People with musical anhedonia experience reduced communication between auditory processing areas and reward networks, as fMRI scans show diminished reward-circuit activation in response to music but normal responses to other stimuli.
• The Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire assesses five dimensions of music reward—emotion, mood regulation, social bonding, movement and novelty—and helps quantify individual differences.
• A twin study suggests genetic factors account for up to 54 percent of the variability in how much pleasure people derive from music.
• Ongoing collaborations with geneticists aim to identify specific genes linked to musical anhedonia and to determine whether the condition remains stable over the lifespan or can be reversed.
• The research reframes reward processing as stimulus-specific and raises the possibility of discovering other forms of specific anhedonia across different sensory domains.