The influence of expectancy on melodic perception.

Abstract

The fulfillment and violation of melodic expectancies influences musicians' ability to perceive, identify, and recall melodic patterns as measured by transcription accuracy. Twenty-seven musicians registered their melodic continuation expectancies by singing. Those expectancies were used to generate six types of brief melodies that varied in their relationships to the individual musician's expectancies: fulfillment of strong expectancies, fulfillment of weak expectancies, interval-size violation of strong or weak expectancies, and contour violation of strong or weak expectancies. The test melodies were presented aurally for transcription. Analysis of variance revealed that violations of strong expectancies led to more errors than expectancy fulfillment. Contour violations did not lead to more errors than mere interval-size violations. Analysis of the pattern of errors suggests that the salience of contour in melody strongly resists the influence of expectancy upon perception, but does not completely overcome it.The process of expectation or anticipation of future events in listening to music is the focus of several theories of music perception. Meyer (1956Meyer ( , 1967 contends that each music style has characteristic patterns of pitch, rhythm, harmony, etc. that occur more often in that style than in others. Through experience with styles, listeners internalize these probabilities of occurrence which become the basis of their expectancies for future events while listening to unfolding music patterns. Expectancies are also influenced by Gestalt laws. These laws dictate that perceptual processes strive towards completion, good continuation, regularity and symmetry, and expectancies reflect these strivings. If these expectancies are violated in music listening, inaccuracies occur in the memory for these events. According to Meyer, encountering unexpected events contributes to a listener's emotional response to music.Jones (1981, 1982) suggests that expectancies in music listening are determined by the "ideal prototypes" of a music style. These prototypes reflect the perfect symmetries which underlie, but rarely appear, in a particular style; expectancies, therefore, are often violated in music. While unexpected events create interest in music, they are also thought to be more difficult to recall. Krumhansl, Bharucha, and Castellano (1982) propose that music patterns are not random events, but conform to patterns that are characteristic of a music culture. Through experience with these patterns, listeners abstract and internalize the underlying regularities in them. These internalizations are called cognitive representations of music, and give rise to expectations as to what is likely to follow in an unfolding music pattern. Krumhansl (1979) suggests that the structure of these internalized regularities also influences the stability of memory traces.Several empirical studies in the psychological and psychomusical literature lend support to the hypothesized existence of prototypes, cognitive representations,

Expectation in Melody: The Influence of Context and Learning

“…From a music-analytic perspective, it has been argued that the generation and subsequent confirmation or violation of expectations is critical to aesthetic experience, and the communication of emotion and meaning in music (Meyer, 1956;Narmour, 1990). From a psychological perspective, expectancy has been found to influence recognition memory for music (Schmuckler, 1997), the production of music (Carlsen, 1981;Schmuckler, 1989Schmuckler, , 1990; Thompson, Cuddy, & Plaus, 1997;Unyk & Carlsen, 1987), the perception of music (Cuddy & Lunny, 1995;Krumhansl, 1995b;Schellenberg, 1996;Schmuckler, 1989), and the transcription of music (Unyk & Carlsen, 1987). While most empirical research has examined the influence of melodic structure, expectancy in music also reflects the influence of rhythmic and metric structure (Jones, 1987;Jones & Boltz, 1989) as well as harmonic structure (Bharucha, 1987;Schmuckler, 1989).…”

Expectancy effects in memory for melodies.

“…Simply defined, "expectation 11 refers to the anticipation of upcoming information based on past and current information. The concept of expectancy has traditionally received, and continues to receive, a great deal of attention from both a music-theoretic (e.g., Meyer, 1956Meyer, ,1965Narmour, 1989Narmour, , 1990Narmour, ,1992 and psychological viewpoint (e.g., Bharucha, 1987Bharucha, , 1994Carlsen, 1981Carlsen, , 1982Carlsen, Divenyi, & Taylor, 1970;Cuddy & Lunney, 1995;Dowling, 1994;Jones, 1976Jones, , 1981Jones, , 1982Jones, , 1990Krumhansl, 1995;Schellenberg, 1996Schellenberg, ,1997Schmuckler, 1989Schmuckler, ,1990Schmuckler & Boltz, 1994;Unyk & Carlsen, 1987).Given this interest, it is not surprising that expectation has been found to play a critical role in many aspects of musical processing. One such area involves listeners' judgments of, and responses to, musical passages.…”

“…A third area in which expectancy plays a role is the production and performance of musical information (Carlsen, 1981;Schellenberg, 1996;Schmuckler, 1989Schmuckler, , 1990Thompson, Cuddy, & Plaus, 1997;Unyk & Carlsen, 1987). For example, Carlsen (1981) and Unyk and Carlsen (1987) had listeners sing continuations in response to different two-note context intervals, with the intervals between the second note of the context and the first note of the listener-produced sequence (the "response interval") analysed in terms of their frequency of occurrence as a function of the context intervals.…”

“…For example, Carlsen (1981) and Unyk and Carlsen (1987) had listeners sing continuations in response to different two-note context intervals, with the intervals between the second note of the context and the first note of the listener-produced sequence (the "response interval") analysed in terms of their frequency of occurrence as a function of the context intervals. These studies demonstrated that response intervals varied in their size, as well as their specificity, with some context intervals producing only a single response interval whereas others generated a range of responses.…”

Toward a Unified Theory of the I-R Model (Part 1)

“…From this beginning, many experiments based on the I-R model ensued (e.g., Cuddy & Lunney, 1995;Krumhansl, 1991bKrumhansl, , 1995aKrumhansl, , 1995bKrumhansl, , 1997Krumhansl et al, 2000;Pearce & Wiggins, 2006;Schellenberg 1996Schellenberg , 1997Schellenberg et al, 2002;Schmuckler, 1989;Thompson, Balkwill, & Vernescu, 2000;Thompson, Cuddy, & Plaus, 1997;Thompson & Stanton, 1998). For other important studies on melodic implication, see Carlsen (1981), Larson (2004), Margulis (2005), and Unyk and Carlsen (1987). following way.…”