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Melodic expectation


In music cognition and musical analysis, the study of melodic expectation considers the engagement of the brain's predictive mechanisms in response to music. For example, if the ascending musical partial octave "do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-..." is heard, listeners familiar with Western music will have a strong expectation to hear or provide one more note, "do", to complete the octave.

Melodic expectation can be considered at the esthesic level, in which case the focus lies on the listener and its response to music. It can be considered at the neutral level, in which case the focus switches to the actual musical content, such as the "printed notes themselves". At the neutral level, the observer may consider logical implications projected onto future elements by past elements or derive statistical observations from information theory.

The notion of melodic expectation has prompted the existence of a corpus of studies in which authors often choose to provide their own terminology in place of using the literature's. This results in an important number of different terms that all point towards the phenomenon of musical expectation:

Expectation can also be found mentioned in relation to concepts originating from the field of information theory such as entropy. Hybridization of information theory and humanities results in the birth of yet other notions, particularly variations upon the notion of entropy modified for the need of description of musical content.

Consideration of musical expectation can be sorted into four trends.

Leonard Meyer's Emotion and Meaning in Music is the classic text in music expectation. Meyer's starting point is the belief that the experience of music (as a listener) is derived from one's emotions and feelings about the music, which themselves are a function of relationships within the music itself. Meyer writes that listeners bring with them a vast body of musical experiences that, as one listens to a piece, conditions one's response to that piece as it unfolds. Meyer argued that music's evocative power derives from its capacity to generate, suspend, prolongate, or violate these expectations.

Meyer models listener expectation in two levels. On a perceptual level, Meyer draws on Gestalt psychology to explain how listeners build mental representations of auditory phenomena. Above this raw perceptual level, Meyer argues that learning shapes (and re-shapes) one's expectations over time.


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