What is it about?
Music can make people feel pleasure, excitement, comfort, connection, or even a strong physical response such as wanting to move with the rhythm. However, not everyone experiences music in the same way. Some people feel deeply moved by music, while others may enjoy it less or respond more neutrally. These differences are important because they can help us understand how people perceive music and sound, how music affects emotions, and why certain individuals are more strongly drawn to musical experiences. The Extended Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire was developed to measure the different ways in which people experience reward and pleasure from music. It asks about several areas, including seeking out music, emotional reactions to music, using music to improve or regulate mood, enjoying music with others, moving in response to rhythm, and becoming deeply absorbed while listening. Our study aimed to make this questionnaire available for Turkish-speaking individuals. We translated and adapted the questionnaire into Turkish and then tested it with 266 adults. We also asked a smaller group of participants to complete it again three weeks later to see whether their responses remained reasonably stable over time. The results showed that the Turkish version performed well overall and measured musical reward consistently and meaningfully. It also reflected the different aspects of musical experience included in the original questionnaire. In addition, people with more musical experience generally reported stronger rewarding responses to music. This Turkish version can help researchers study how people differ in the way they perceive, enjoy, and respond to music. It may also support future research in music perception, auditory perception, emotional responses to sound, and the possible use of music in applied or clinical settings.
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Why is it important?
People differ greatly in how they experience pleasure, emotion, and engagement while listening to music. Understanding these differences can support research on music perception, auditory perception, and emotional responses to sound. This study provides the first validated Turkish version of the Extended Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire. The questionnaire measures several aspects of musical reward, including emotional responses, mood regulation, social connection, movement to rhythm, musical seeking, and absorption during listening. The work is timely because interest in individual differences in musical reward is growing across music psychology, auditory science, neuroscience, and applied research. A reliable Turkish-language version enables Turkish-speaking participants to be included in this field and supports future cross-cultural and clinical research.
Perspectives
What makes this study particularly meaningful to me is that it connects two areas that are often considered separately: auditory perception and the subjective experience of reward from music. My perspective as an audiologist extends beyond the detection of sound to the ways in which it is perceived, emotionally experienced, and assigned personal meaning. The Turkish adaptation of the eBMRQ involved more than linguistic translation; it required establishing whether the construct of musical reward could be represented reliably and meaningfully within a different linguistic and cultural context. It was an opportunity to make a multidimensional measure of musical reward available to a new linguistic and cultural context. I hope this work will support future research on why individuals respond so differently to music and will help extend musical reward research into areas such as hearing, clinical audiology, and music-based interventions.
Ozgenur Cetinbag-Kuzu
Department of Audiology, Faculty of Health Sciences, Sakarya University, Sakarya, Türkiye
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Reliability and validity of the Turkish version of the extended Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire, PLOS One, June 2026, PLOS,
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0347517.
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