The role of expectation in music: from the score to emotions and the brain

Abstract

Like discourse, music is a dynamic process that occurs over time. Listeners usually expect some events or structures of events to occur in the prolongation of a given context. Part of the musical emotional experience would depend upon how composers (improvisers) fulfill these expectancies. Musical expectations are a core phenomenon of music cognition, and the present article provides an overview of its foundation in the score as well as in listeners' behavior and brain, and how it can be simulated by artificial neural networks. We highlight parallels to language processing and include the attentional and emotional dimensions of musical expectations. Studying musical expectations is thus valuable not only for our understanding of music perception and production but also for more general brain functioning. Some open and challenging issues are summarized in this article. WIREs Cogn Sci 2014, 5:105-113. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1262 CONFLICT OF INTEREST: The authors have no conflict of interest to declare. For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

Toward a general psychological model of tension and suspense

“…Furthermore, both long-term and short-term knowledge are relevant for the formation of predictions. Predictive processes in music, for example, build on long-term knowledge that is acquired over years of exposure to a musical system (e.g., Western tonal music), as well as short-term knowledge that is acquired during the exposure to a specific music piece ( Pearce and Wiggins, 2012 ; Rohrmeier and Koelsch, 2012 ; Tillmann et al, 2014 ). Musical events generating strong expectations for upcoming events are then potential triggers of tension.…”

Applying Acoustical and Musicological Analysis to Detect Brain Responses to Realistic Music: A Case Study

“…These are measured with EEG electrodes placed on the scalp, while the magnetic counterpart of the potentials is measured with MEG sensors positioned around the head. While basic brain responses originating from the auditory cortex in reaction to acoustical changes in music can be measured, novel events in music also evoke novelty-related brain responses originating from higher-order cortical structures such as the inferior frontal cortex [10][11][12][13][14].…”

“…A novelty-related brain response is typically evoked after briefly learning to expect a certain parametric level in acoustical features followed by a change in the acoustical parameter [16]. In addition, the novelty-related brain response can be evoked by novel events, which are infrequent in relation to the listener's prior developed understanding of which events are frequent and infrequent in the music style before hearing the current music piece [13,14,[17][18][19][20][21][22][23]. To measure such novelty-related brain responses, it would be relevant to analyze the novelty of the musical events.…”

Studying Musical Savants: A Commentary on Grundy and Ockelford (2014)

“…All these paradigms have been adapted in the past to assess expectations in music (see Tillmann, Poulin-Charronnat, & Bigand, 2014, for a review). The authors say that "since the focus is on between-group expectations that may arise in the first hearing of a piece, a multiplicity of short passages would need to be constructed in order to test a listener's reaction to implications involving different numbers of motifs."…”