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When music is perceived, like many other signals from your senses, it can be processed through two pathways: bottom-up or top-down. Bottom-up processing occurs when you take in signals from the ear into your brain which process the signals as regular sound or music. On the other, hand, top-down processing occurs when your brain applies already existing concepts in your mind to the incoming signals. Bottom-up processing is the reason you know that a sound is being made, while top-down processing is the reason you know that it's music (and if that music is any good!). Recurrent processing may also occur when top-down processes interact with bottom-up processes, such as when listening to a long piece of music and it is continuously processed as more sound is taken in, within the context of the sound already heard. Bottom-up processing will occur whenever you are hearing any noise or song - click here for the difference between noise and music - but below are some more specific examples of top-down processing.
Top-Down Processing
Top-Down Processing
This video contains some well-known songs converted into Midi sound files, which means all the sounds were instead coded as piano key sounds. See if you can pick up the lyrics in just the piano versions - there are no actual words being spoken, but if you are familiar with these songs you are more likely to hear these lyrics due to the expectations you already have about the lyrical progression of the song. Here are the timestamps for the first three songs:
0:00 “Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gees piano midi
Which of these street drummers sounds the best to you? Which melody is the most memorable? Research indicates that music from within your own culture is preferred and more memorable. This is likely due to top-down processing of music, applying expectations from music that you are familiar with and music which sounds similar to your culture's musical style.
ITPRA: Imagination-Tension-Prediction-Reaction-Appraisal model for Musical Expectation
ITPRA: Imagination-Tension-Prediction-Reaction-Appraisal model for Musical Expectation
In his 2006 book Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation, Dr. David Huron proposed a model of responses to music listening with 5 levels. These different responses controlled pleasure-related responses to aspects of music which did not necessarily have to do with preference, but with more universal responses related to the expectation and reactions to music. This model is widely cited, but others exist as alternate theories of music expectation (though Dr. Huron's made the most sense to us!). Most other models will instead focus on the qualities of music (such as the specific notes), while this one is a more universal explanation.
These five responses were:
Imaginative
This kind of response occurs most of the time before listening to a piece of music. The imaginative response exists to allow us to imagine a pleasant (or unpleasant) piece of music, and this imagination creates an emotional response, positive or negative, that is a lessened version of what we would feel if listening to said piece of music. This emotional response drives us to seek out pleasant music and avoid unpleasant music. This is a more conscious response.
Tension
This kind of response occurs immediately before listening to a piece of music. When you know you are about to listen to music, your body automatically makes you more aroused - meaning an increased heart rate, quicker breathing, pupil dilation, focusing attention on the anticipated source, etc - because you need to be adequately aroused to properly perceive music. Your mind unconsciously tries to adjust the timing of this response, because being aroused expends a lot of energy and we are wired not to expend unnecessary energy, as well as the amount that you are aroused, for the same reason. This is a more unconscious response.
Prediction
This kind of response occurs immediately after listening to a sound in a piece of music. If the music you are listening to matches with what you anticipated / predicted it would sound like, there is a psychological reward, but if it does not match (like when a lyric is misspoken or a note is missed) there is a psychological punishment. This reaction exists to reward correct predictions, and is an unconscious reaction.
Reactive
This kind of response also occurs immediately after listening to a sound in a piece of music, in tandem with the prediction response. The reactive response is like an immediate reflex to what you are specifically listening to, and is unconscious. These reflex-like responses can be learned over time, or they can be part of human nature. This includes responses like cringing at an instrument you don't like, as well as the immediate displeasure of hearing a discordant note. This is a more unconscious reaction.
Appraisal
This kind of response occurs a longer time following listening to a sound in a piece of music. It involves the psychological rewards/punishments associated with thinking about the piece of music, such as contemplating the reason or implications of the music. For example, the music might be an alarm which signals you now need to wake up or switch tasks, a signal to tune your attention in to a message immediately following it, or music at a wedding which signals it is your turn to dance. This response can match the reactive response or not, depending on the situation, and is a more conscious level of processing.
This page deals mostly with the cognitive models of processing music. For details about the anatomy of these processes, see the Anatomy page.
These processes also differ individually, see the Individual Variation page for more details.
References
Demorest, S. M., Morrison, S. J., Nguyen, V. Q., & Bodnar, E. N. (2016). The Influence of Contextual Cues on Cultural Bias in Music Memory. Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 33(5), 590–600. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26417336
Huron, David. (2006). Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation. 10.7551/mitpress/6575.001.0001.
Juslin, Patrik N., 'What Comes Next? Musical Expectancy', Musical Emotions Explained: Unlocking the Secrets of Musical Affect (Oxford, 2019; online edn, Oxford Academic, 23 May 2019), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198753421.003.0024, accessed 4 Dec. 2023.
Kraus, N. (2021). Music is the Jackpot: Sensing, Thinking, Moving, Feeling. In Of sound mind: How our brain constructs a meaningful sonic world (pp. 95–107). essay, The MIT Press.
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