Two approaches exist for explaining harmonic expectation. The sensory approach claims that harmonic expectation is a low-level process driven by sensory responses to acoustic properties of musical sounds. Conversely, the cognitive approach describes harmonic expectation as a high-level cognitive process driven by the recognition of syntactic structure learned through experience. Many previous studies have sought to distinguish these two hypotheses, largely yielding support for the cognitive hypothesis. However, subsequent re-analysis has shown that most of these results can parsimoniously be explained by a computational model from the sensory tradition, namely Leman’s (2000) model of auditory short- term memory (Bigand, Delbé, Poulin-Charronnat, Leman, & Tillmann, 2014). In this research we re-examine the explanatory power of auditory short-term memory models, and compare them to a new model in the Information Dynamics Of Music (IDyOM) tradition, which simulates a cognitive theory of harmony perception based on statistical learning and probabilistic prediction. We test the ability of these models to predict the surprisingness of chords within chord sequences (N = 300), as reported by a sample group of university undergraduates (N = 50). In contrast to previous studies, which typically use artificial stimuli composed in a classical idiom, we use naturalistic chord sequences sampled from a large dataset of popular music. Our results show that the auditory short-term memory models have remarkably low explanatory power in this context. In contrast, the new statistical learning model predicts surprisingness ratings relatively effectively. We conclude that auditory short-term memory is insufficient to explain harmonic expectation, and that cognitive processes of statistical learning and probabilistic prediction provide a viable alternative.

Simultaneous consonance is a salient perceptual phenomenon corresponding to the perceived pleasantness of simultaneously sounding musical tones. Various competing theories of consonance have been proposed over the centuries, but recently a consensus has developed that simultaneous consonance is primarily driven by harmonicity perception. Here we question this view, substantiating our argument by critically reviewing historic consonance research from a broad variety of disciplines, re-analyzing consonance perception data from four previous behavioral studies representing more than 500 participants, and modeling three Western musical corpora representing more than 100,000 compositions. We conclude that simultaneous consonance is a composite phenomenon that derives in large part from three phenomena: interference, periodicity/harmonicity, and cultural familiarity. We formalize this conclusion with a computational model that predicts a musical chord’s simultaneous consonance from these three features, and release this model in an open-source R package, incon, alongside 15 other computational models also evaluated in this paper. We hope that this package will facilitate further psychological and musicological research into simultaneous consonance.

Chills are a psychophysiological response which can be experienced when listening to music. They have been of particular interest in scientific research on music because of their association with emotion and pleasure. With the literature almost doubling in size since the last review on the subject, a comprehensive survey is needed to provide a solid basis for future research. In this article, we explore the context behind current research on chills, discuss how they relate to emotional and aesthetic responses, assess current empirical measures and paradigms, summarise their physiological and neural correlates, categorise their possible stimulus-driven elicitors, examine how they are affected by individual differences, and evaluate theories about their potential evolutionary causes. We conclude by providing a set of recommendations for future research, and include a dataset listing pieces of music reported to elicit chills in the reviewed literature.

We present a novel set of 200 Western tonal musical stimuli (MUST) to be used in research on perception and appreciation of music. It consists of four subsets of 50 stimuli varying in balance, contour, symmetry, or complexity. All are 4 s long and designed to be musically appealing and experimentally controlled. We assessed them behaviorally and computationally. The behavioral assessment (Study 1) aimed to determine whether musically untrained participants could identify variations in each attribute. Forty-three participants rated the stimuli in each subset on the corresponding attribute. We found that inter-rater reliability was high and that the ratings mirrored the design features well. Participants’ ratings also served to create an abridged set of 24 stimuli per subset. The computational assessment (Study 2) required the development of a specific battery of computational measures describing the structural properties of each stimulus. We distilled nonredundant composite measures for each attribute and examined whether they predicted participants’ ratings. Our results show that the composite measures indeed predicted participants’ ratings. Moreover, the composite complexity measure predicted complexity ratings at least as well as existing models of musical complexity. We conclude that the four subsets are suitable for use in studies that require presenting participants with short musical motifs varying in balance, contour, symmetry, or complexity, and that the stimuli and the computational measures are valuable resources for research in music psychology, empirical aesthetics, music information retrieval, and musicology. The MUST set and MATLAB toolbox codifying the computational measures are freely available at osf.io/bfxz7.

Evaluative judgment—i.e., assessing to what degree a stimulus is liked or disliked—is a fundamental aspect of cognition, facilitating comparison and choosing among alternatives, deciding, and prioritizing actions. Neuroimaging studies have shown that evaluative judgment involves the projection of sensory information to the reward circuit. To investigate whether evaluative judgments are based on modality-specific or modality-general attributes, we compared the extent to which balance, contour, symmetry, and complexity affect liking responses in the auditory and visual modalities. We found no significant correlation for any of the four attributes across sensory modalities, except for contour. This suggests that evaluative judgments primarily rely on modality-specific sensory representations elaborated in the brain’s sensory cortices and relayed to the reward circuit, rather than abstract modality-general representations. The individual traits art experience, openness to experience, and desire for aesthetics were associated with the extent to which design or compositional attributes influenced liking, but inconsistently across sensory modalities and attributes, also suggesting modality-specific influences.

Empirical aesthetics has mainly focused on general and simple relations between stimulus features and aesthetic appreciation. Consequently, to explain why people differ so much in what they like and prefer continues to be a challenge for the field. One possible reason is that people differ in their aesthetic sensitivity, i.e., the extent to which they weigh certain stimulus features. Studies have shown that people vary substantially in their aesthetic sensitivities to visual balance, contour, symmetry, and complexity, and that this variation explains why people like different things. Our goal here was to extend this line of research to music and examine aesthetic sensitivity to musical balance, contour, symmetry, and complexity. Forty-eight non-musicians rated their liking for 96 4-second Western tonal musical motifs, arranged in four subsets varying in balance, contour, symmetry, or complexity. We used linear mixed-effects models to estimate individual differences in the extent to which each musical attribute determined their liking. The results showed that participants differed remarkably in the extent to which their liking was explained by musical balance, contour, symmetry, and complexity. Furthermore, a retest after two weeks showed that this measure of aesthetic sensitivity is reliable, and suggests that aesthetic sensitivity is a stable personal trait. Finally, cluster analyses revealed that participants divided into two groups with different aesthetic sensitivity profiles, which were also largely stable over time. These results shed light on aesthetic sensitivity to musical content and are discussed in relation to comparable existing research in empirical aesthetics.

Expectation is crucial for our enjoyment of music, yet the underlying generative mechanism remains contested. While sensory–acoustic models derive predictions based on the short-term auditory input alone, cognitive models assume the use of abstract knowledge of music structure acquired over the long-term. To evaluate these two contrasting mechanisms, we compared simulations from computational models of musical expectancy against subjective surprise ratings of chords sampled from US Billboard pop songs in musicians and non-musicians. Bayesian model comparison revealed that probabilistic knowledge of music structure and auditory short-term memory both explained unique behavioural variance without mediation. However, probabilistic knowledge accounted for nearly four times as much variance in musicians, and over twice as much in non-musicians. Incorporating both probabilistic knowledge and auditory short-term memory together furthermore improved predictive accuracy over the individual models. Our findings thus motivate an alternative to the current debate by emphasising the distinct, albeit complementary, roles of cognitive and sensory information in forming expectations during music-listening in humans.