,,,Recent evidence suggests that music that appears complex to the ears but can be easily deciphered by the brain — many classical compositions, for example — rate the most enjoyable.

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Hudson used music compression programs to mimic how the brain condenses audio information to analyze a sampling of songs used by another research team in a 2009 study that measured how 26 subjects enjoyed various music genres , including classical, jazz, pop, folk, electronica, rock, punk, techno and tango.

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"It is an inescapable law of nature that the amount of satisfaction one gains from achieving something is related to how hard it is – and easy things can only elicit a fleeting superficial sort of pleasure. The simplest tunes would be, say, ascending scales, which would quickly get irritating rather than be stimulating," Hudson said. "This applies to a lot of things, such as puzzles we enjoy doing, sports we enjoy playing, careers that stimulate us."

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So what makes certain songs and melodies, such as Beethoven's 3rd Symphony, more "timeless" and universally enjoyed than others isn't just their perceived beauty, but also their levels of compression. "I believe the theory applies equally to all musical genres, but that classical music has shown the compression quality to the greatest extent, based on my preliminary analyses," Hudson said.

What Makes Music Enjoyable?