Week1.9 (expectation)

Expectations

Exposure to (western tonal) music means that listeners develop implicit understanding of the rules and regularities in the music and therefore expectations about future events when hearing a new piece :

  • The idea of implicit knowledge is crucial here (here is a detailed review about implicit musical knowledge). Listeners are sensitive to tonal events and context even though they are not able to label these with the appropriate musical terminology (e.g. dominant-tonic). "Listeners’ tonal knowledge is necessary to interpret differently the same sound event depending on the context in which it occurs. Acculturated listeners understand these musical structures in an implicit way."

    • Section 2.2 of Tillman's chapter discusses some findings about non-musicians knowledge of tonal relationships.

    • to understand more about the nature of the evidence you can read more about the methods e.g. probe tone technique.

  • Note the following observation: "Experimental research on music perception has to find a balance between the complexity of real musical material and strong experimental control of the used material – leading to the use of simple tone contexts or melodies."

  • Expectation are about what and when.

  • Evidence of cross-modal influences (section 3.2) suggest that expectations may be guiding our overall attention.

  • Priming: "The tendency for a stimulus to facilitate the processing of some related ensuing stimulus. For example, when previously presented with the word red a subject will respond faster to most tasks involved in processing the subsequent word blue. That is, the prior presentation of red is said to prime the representation for blue." (Huron)

    • Section 3.1 in Tillman describes some relevant experimental evidence.

  • Meyer (and others) suggest that expectations play a significant role in musical expression: "From this play between violations, disruptions and resolutions of expectations raise meaningful and expressive moments in music". But how can expectations be violated when listening to a familiar piece? The suggestion (see section 3.3 for discussion and experimental evidence) is that at least some expectations are an automatic response.

Further reading: review of several works on expectations (including Meyer's work and Narmour's implication-realisation model) from Marcus Pearce.