Why can one person love a song that feels safely familiar while another finds it unbearably dull? This study found that music’s sweet spot really does move from person to person—but not for the reasons researchers expected. People prefer music with an intermediate level of predictability: not so predictable as to be boring, yet not so unpredictable that it ceases to be music.

But that sweet spot varies because people perceive predictability differently. The study asked whether psychotic and autistic traits were associated with a higher preference for predictability in music. Participants heard pre-composed music excerpts whose complexity had been scored by musical experts.

A person’s preferred level of predictability was treated as the peak of an inverted U-shaped curve between music complexity and liking: the point where enjoyment was highest. Research suggests that intermediate predictability produces the most stimulation without aversion and is experienced as most pleasurable; people prefer songs with intermediate rather than low or high predictability.

That inverted U-shaped relationship between liking and predictability has appeared not only in music, but also in visual patterns, geometric shapes, and online pages. A preference for the middle has even been found in infants, suggesting that the pull toward a manageable level of stimulation is not limited to experienced adult listeners.

The central question was whether tendencies toward psychosis and autism spectrum disorder were related to a higher preference for predictability in music. Music was chosen because it offers a natural setting: music composed and performed by humans can capture people’s real-life responses to unpredictability more closely than an artificial laboratory signal.

To connect enjoyment with personal traits, the preferred level of complexity had to be identified for each person. It was defined as the peak of the inverted U-shaped curve between preference and complexity. The core idea was to define each participant’s preferred complexity as the peak, or apex, of that person’s inverted U-shaped curve between preference and complexity scores.

The results confirmed an inverted U-shaped pattern between liking and musical complexity. Music became more appealing up to a point, then less appealing as complexity continued to rise. The peaks varied between individuals, and preferred levels of complexity spanned the entire range of complexity used in the music.

People did not agree on one ideal level of musical complexity: many preferred the simplest music offered, while others favored moderate or much more complex music. This spread suggests that personal differences mattered more than one universal sweet spot.

Here is the surprise: preferred level of complexity was neither associated with autistic traits nor with psychotic-like experiences. Other measured factors, including music experience and mood, also could not explain the individual differences in preferred complexity. Using a different way to estimate musical unpredictability produced the same overall results.

The result does not refute the idea that people with psychosis may generally prefer predictability. The study was conducted in a non-clinical sample, and psychotic-trait scores were concentrated toward the lower end of the scale. The findings indicate that a general-population sample may not be sufficient to detect a relationship between tendencies toward psychosis and a preference for predictability in music.

People with delusions have reported a higher preference for predictability than healthy controls, while no such association was found for delusion-proneness in the general population. The study found that the sweet spot for predictability in composed music varies between individuals, but it found no support for autistic or psychotic traits being associated with liking predictable music.

The authors stress that these results do not refute a general preference for predictability in psychosis or autism spectrum disorder. The practical lesson is personal, not diagnostic: the sweet spot for predictability in composed music varies between individuals, while psychotic and autistic traits were not associated with liking predictable music.

Accordingly, incorporating a large range of stimulus predictability is needed to account for this variation in the sweet spot for music predictability. People differ widely in how much musical predictability they enjoy. In this study, autistic traits and psychotic-like experiences did not explain those differences, so personal variation matters more than a simple diagnostic story.