This fMRI study investigates the effect of melody on aesthetic experience in listeners na？ve to formal musical knowledge. Using simple melodic lines, whose syntactic structure was manipulated, we created systematic acoustic dissonance. Two stimulus categories were created: canonical (syntactically “correct,” in the Western culture) and modified (made of an altered version of the canonical melodies). The stimuli were presented under two tasks: listening and aesthetic judgment. Data were analyzed as a function of stimulus structure (canonical and modified) and stimulus aesthetics, as appraised by each participant during scanning. The critical contrast modified versus canonical stimuli produced enhanced activation of deep temporal regions, including the parahippocampus, suggesting that melody manipulation induced feelings of unpleasantness in the listeners. This was supported by our behavioral data indicating decreased aesthetic preference for the modified melodies. Medial temporal activation could also have been evoked by stimulus structural novelty determining increased memory load for the modified stimuli. The analysis of melodies judged as beautiful revealed that aesthetic judgment of simple melodies relied on a fine-structural analysis of the stimuli subserved by a left frontal activation and, possibly, on meaning attribution at the charge of right superior temporal sulcus for increasingly pleasurable stimuli. 1. Introduction Music is simultaneously art and science: it allows the artist to express his/her inner world through sounds, which are linked one to another by stringent rules that are strongly influenced by culture. These rules represent hallmarks that, on one side, constrain the composer’s freedom to choose associations and successions of sounds and, on the other, offer a context, within which all elements gain a meaning. Traditionally, there has been a strong tendency to emphasize the dominance of compositional structures in outlining the aesthetic character of a musical piece. In the present study, we investigated this relationship by exploring the aesthetics of melody, that is, the capacity of simple musical structures to evoke an aesthetic experience in listeners na？ve to formal musical knowledge. Music is made of rules that govern the relation between notes and of a dynamic dimension that defines its tempo and rhythm. As far as the succession of sounds is concerned, the founding rules of a musical piece are also referred to as syntactic rules (this denomination implicitly underlines the similarities between music and language). Music
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