The Impact of Voice Leading and Harmony on Musical Expectancy

Abstract

In Western tonal music, voice leading (VL) and harmony are two central concepts influencing whether a musical sequence is perceived as well-formed. However, experimental studies have primarily focused on the effect of harmony on the cognitive processing of polyphonic music. The additional effect of VL remains unknown, despite music theory suggesting VL to be tightly connected to harmony. therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate and compare the effects of both VL and harmony on listener expectations. Using a priming paradigm and a choice reaction time task, participants (n = 34) were asked to indicate whether the final chord in a sequence had a different timbre than the preceding ones (cover task), with the experimental conditions being good and poor VL or harmony, respectively. An analysis with generalised mixed effects models revealed a significant influence of both VL and harmony on reaction times (RTs). Moreover, pairwise comparison showed significantly faster RTs when VL was good as compared to both VL and harmony being poor, which was not the case when only harmony was good. this study thus provides evidence for the additional importance of VL for the processing of Western polyphonic music.

Effects of Chord Inversion and Bass Patterns on Harmonic Expectancy in Musicians

“…In Progression 4, participants rated the root-position version of the paradigmatic triad as lower than the mismatched triad, suggesting that listeners give the bassline particularly strong weight in this instance. Aligning with the findings of Wall et al (2020), this likely demonstrates strong and specific expectations associated with the bassline pattern of this particular progression (i.e., the tendency of the bass of a V 4/2 chord to resolve downward by step). Additionally, we did not observe participants harboring general preferences for particular chords and inversions.…”

“…Similarly, Sears, Caplin, and McAdams (2012) and Sears et al (2017b) show that certain phrase-ending cadences (particularly, cadences involving a root-position tonic and dominant harmonies) are rated as more stable and complete than other endings, with inversions of the penultimate chords affecting these ratings. Wall, Lieck, Neuwirth, and Rohrmeier (2020) additionally demonstrate that musical sequences are perceived as well-formed when both harmony and voice leading adhere to listener expectations, and that deviations in paradigmatic voice leading may be more surprising to listeners than are deviations in harmony. In the same vein, historical research has shown that patterns between outer voices are fundamental to understanding certain compositional styles (Gjerdingen, 2007;Symons, 2017), and music theory textbooks are replete with examples of chords being contextually appropriate only when particular chord members appear as the bass pitch (Aldwell & Schachter, 2003;Laitz, 2012).…”

“…Many of these observations might be a feature of these stimuli being progressions rather than isolated events (Bigand & Parncutt, 1999;Parncutt,1997;Wall et al, 2020): if we had provided less progression-oriented stimuli or instructions, we might well have observed some different preferences in our participants (as argued in Tillmann et al, 1998). Additionally, there are many musical parameters that contribute to the feeling of connection and attraction between two chords, including common-tone retention, half-step motion, chord hierarchy, etc.…”

Geometry of Music Perception

“…Our ability to anticipate future events is another vital aspect of human evolution. Perceptual expectation has been studied in cognitive neuroscience [15], and it is also a fundamental part of music [45,75,82,85,88,110]. Clearly, musical expectation depends on the listener, or, more precisely, on his brain and its musical training [12].…”

“…Since our pitch perception is rather forgiving and imprecise, pitch perception corresponds to a probability distribution and therefore a smoothing should be applied to frequencies as in [67], which gives a rigorous way of evaluating similarity of chords or more generally pitch collections using expectation tensors. Recent work by Wall et al [110] analyzes voice-leading and harmony in the context of musical expectancy which is precisely the motivation for our geometric model. Some very interesting vertical ideas on a scientific approach to music can be found in [114], even though there are-strictly speaking-no new results in that specific article: The brain's exceptional ability for soft computing and pattern recognition on incomplete or over-determined data is relevant for our model.…”