Expecting the end: Continuous expectancy ratings for tonal cadences

Abstract

Cognitive accounts for the formation of expectations during music listening have largely centered around mental representations of scales using both melodic and harmonic stimuli. This study extends these findings to the most recurrent cadence patterns associated with tonal music using a real-time, continuous-rating paradigm. Musicians and nonmusicians heard cadential excerpts selected from Mozart’s keyboard sonatas (perfect authentic cadence [PAC], imperfect authentic cadence [IAC], half cadence [HC], deceptive cadence [DC], and evaded cadence [EV]), and continuously rated the strength of their expectations that the end of each excerpt is imminent. As predicted, expectations for closure increased over the course of each excerpt and then peaked at or near the target melodic tone and chord. Cadence categories for which tonic harmony was the expected goal (PAC, IAC, DC, EV) received the highest and earliest expectancy ratings, whereas cadence categories ending with dominant harmony (HC) received the lowest and latest ratings, suggesting that dominant harmony elicits weaker expectations in anticipation of its occurrence in cadential contexts. A regression analysis also revealed that longer excerpts featuring dense textures and a cadential six-four harmony received the highest ratings overall.

Expectations for tonal cadences: Sensory and cognitive priming effects

“…As expected, ratings of expectation strength, specificity, and phrase completion exhibited a U-shaped pattern across the selected cadence categories, with the PAC and HC categories receiving the highest and lowest ratings, respectively. These findings from real musical examples support the view that tonic harmony elicits stronger and more specific expectations for its occurrence than does dominant harmony within the tonal system (Bharucha & Krumhansl, 1983; Sears, Spitzer, Caplin, & McAdams, 2018), and so appears at the top of the harmonic hierarchy (Krumhansl et al, 1982). When the stimuli included the terminal, target melodic and harmonic events in the nontruncated condition, however, ratings of expectation fit demonstrated the same descending linear trend observed in other experiments, with the HC category positioned not at the bottom of expectancy fit scale, but somewhere in the middle (Sears, 2016; Sears et al, 2014; Sears et al, 2018).…”

Musical Garden Paths: Evidence for Syntactic Revision Beyond the Linguistic Domain

“…However, unlike the effect of updating expectations over future events (Pearce & Wiggins, 2012 ; Sears, Spitzer, Caplin, & McAdams, 2020 ), the perceptual and cognitive nature of revision of musical structure has not received much empirical attention. Additionally, it is even unclear whether revision should exist at all in music: while the success of the parsing process in language is subject to the evolutionary pressure of effectively formulating (Friederici, Chomsky, Berwick, Moro, & Bolhuis, 2017 ) and communicating (Pinker & Jackendoff, 2005 ) propositional content, the nature of musical communicative interactions may not require arbitrary specificity and deterministic agreement among interactants (Cross, 2009 ; Fitch, 2006 ; Jackendoff, 2009 ).…”

Final-note expectancy and humor: an empirical investigation

“…Musical expectations have been studied using experimental paradigms aiming to identify when and how listeners form expectations of an incomplete musical stimulus, and what they expect the next element will be. Stimuli include pairs of tones [ 26 ], scales [ 15 ], sequences of tones or chords [ 27 ], [ 28 ], and cadences [ 29 ]. In some designs, participants are required to continue incomplete stimuli by singing [ 17 ], using a keyboard [ 28 ], or even continuing the incomplete stimulus in writing [ 30 ].…”

“…Also, Arthur [ 32 ] claims that listeners’ higher ratings of tonic triad notes in a chord sequence are attributable not to tonal stability but the effects of the local chord context. Probe-tone paradigms thus reflect cadential expectations of melodies, addressed in tonal contexts (see [ 24 ], [ 29 ], [ 33 ] for cadential melodic expectations see [ 34 ], [ 35 ]). Our method in this study focuses exclusively on participants’ cadential melodic expectancies.…”