THIS STUDY EXPLORES THE UNDERLYING MECHANISMSresponsible for the perception of cadential closure in Mozart's keyboard sonatas. Previous investigations into the experience of closure have typically relied upon the use of abstract harmonic formulae as stimuli. However, these formulae often misrepresent the ways in which composers articulate phrase endings in tonal music. This study, on the contrary, examines a wide variety of cadential types typically found in the classical style, including evaded cadences, which have yet to be examined in an experimental setting. The present findings reveal that cadential categories play a pivotal role in the perception of closure, and for musicians especially, ratings of the cadential categories provide empirical support for a model of cadential strength proposed in music theory. A number of rhetorical features also affect participants' ratings of closure, such as formal context, the presence of a melodic dissonance at the cadential arrival, and the use of a trill within the penultimate dominant. Finally, the results indicate that expertise modulates attention, with musicians privileging bassline motion and nonmusicians attending primarily to the soprano voice.

The article examines notions traditionally attached to the concept of cadence in general, retains those features finding genuine expression in "the classical style" (as defined by the instrumental works of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven), and investigates problematic ideas that have the potential of producing theoretical and analytical confusion. It is argued that cadence effects formal closure only at middle-ground levels of structure; a cadential progression is highly constrained in its harmonic content; cadential function precedes the moment of cadential arrival, whereas the music following this arrival may be postcadential in function; cadential content must be distinguished from cadential function; cadence represents a formal end, not a rhythmic or textural stop; and cadential strength can be distinguished in its syntactical and rhetorical aspects. An analysis of selected musical passages demonstrates that an accurate identification of cadence has a major impact on the interpretation of musical form and phrase structure.

Studies examining the formation of melodic and harmonic expectations during music listening have repeatedly demonstrated that a tonal context primes listeners to expect certain (tonally related) continuations over others. However, few such studies have (1) selected stimuli using ready examples of expectancy violation derived from real-world instances of tonal music; (2) provided a consistent account for the influence of sensory and cognitive mechanisms on tonal expectancies by comparing different computational simulations; or (3) combined melodic and harmonic representations in modelling cognitive processes of expectation. To resolve these issues, this study measures expectations for the most recurrent cadence patterns associated with tonal music and then simulates the reported findings using three sensory-cognitive models of auditory expectation. In Experiment 1, participants provided explicit retrospective expectancy ratings both before and after hearing the target melodic tone and chord of the cadential formula.In Experiment 2, participants indicated as quickly as possible whether those target events were in or out of tune relative to the preceding context. Across both experiments, cadences terminating with stable melodic tones and chords elicited the highest expectancy ratings and the fastest and most accurate responses. Moreover, the model simulations supported a cognitive interpretation of tonal processing, in which listeners with exposure to tonal music generate expectations as a consequence of the frequent (co-)occurrence of events on the musical surface.

This study examines how the mind’s predictive mechanisms contribute to the perception ofcadential closure during music listening. Using the Information Dynamics of Music model(or IDyOM) to simulate the formation of schematic expectations—a finite-context (orn-gram) model that predicts the next event in a musical stimulus by acquiring knowledgethrough unsupervised statistical learning of sequential structure—we predict the terminalmelodic and harmonic events from 245 exemplars of the five most common cadencecategories from the classical style. Our findings demonstrate that (1) terminal events fromcadential contexts are more predictable than those from non-cadential contexts; (2) modelsof cadential strength advanced in contemporary cadence typologies reflect the formation ofschematic expectations; and (3) a significant decrease in predictability follows the terminalnote and chord events of the cadential formula

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