Beauty and brain recognition in fine arts and music

Part 1. The eternal question

What is a beauty? - It seems to be a haunting question challenging minds for centuries.
Leonardo Da Vinci tried to get his own answer, and famous pictures of a human body with circles, rectangles and triangles around it that show the best proportions considered to be the most pleasing, beautiful and attractive. The golden section is considered the ultimate rule of proportion for artists for a long time.
We look at a picture and immediately can decide whether it is pleasant and beautiful or not.
And musical sounds can be felt and perceived as beautiful or terrible, depending on many reasons.

What is the secret of beauty? Why people love? - So many questions that do not have exact answers.
I think there are many reasons why a human being considers or feels that something is beautiful.
And this is why there is no single answer. But I truly believe that there are the same fundamental reasons and principles that cause people to recognize, feel, understand, and appreciate (in this order, as I'll explain later) the beautiful in the arts and surrounding world.

Let's start with a well-known fact: not all people love the same musical pieces, musical styles and trends.
Most of western people do not like, appreciate, recognize and understand Chinese music, especially the ancient traditional Chinese music. Often they describe Chinese music as unrecognizable cacophony. Why is that? The answer may lie in a simple fact that they never have been listening to this kind of music before. Europeans who live for a long time in China (or, for that matter, in any Eastern country) start to understand and like the Eastern music more and more as they become more exposed to it.

I can offer a simple explanation to the fact: in order to appreciate certain music, one needs to recognize it, hear melody, rhythm, harmony,  differentiate it from other pieces or songs, and PREDICT (this is very important) how it develops and where it leads in terms of the basic attributes/components of musical pieces I just mentioned.
An ability to predict the musical development is very important and is a part of the brain recognition of the music. For instance, a resolution to consonance is easily recognizable by a trained ear (read: brain), and leads to a satisfaction, a feeling that supports successful recognition of any kind, whether it is music, art, surrounding nature or anything else that we can sense with all of our five (or six) senses. Prediction is a way to test the result of recognition, and if it is confirmed, a human can feel more comfortable and safe, which leads to a feeling of satisfaction. Satisfaction then transforms itself into the recognition of beauty.

A giant leap to visual arts example: it is well-known that a composition is considered good if it incorporates simple geometric shapes like lines, triangles, rectangles and circles. Simply put, a human brain can easily recognize these well-structured objects and thus establish a foundation for recognizing a picture as a whole.
Recent researches (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/09/060926171101.htm) show that people score prototypical (generalized, average) images of human faces and other objects higher than individual images. Prototypes are easier recognized by human brain, therefore their preference as more beautiful images.

More to come... Stay tuned.