Behavioral evidence of a harmonic surprise effect on preference in popular music

•Listeners prefer stimuli with moderate increases in harmonic surprise.•Moderate increases in both absolute and contrastive surprise lead to increased preference.•Participants with increased consistency in responses are more likely to prefer increases in contrastive surprise.•Using novel stimuli, controlling for other factors, there is evidence of increased harmonic.•Surprise causing preference, as opposed to correlations shown in previous studies.