Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation

  • David Huron
Bradford Books: 2006. 462 pp. $40 0262083450 | ISBN: 0-262-08345-0

Imagine that just before sounding the final chord of a Beethoven piano sonata, a concert pianist abruptly interrupts the performance to answer the phone that has just rung in his tuxedo pocket. The audience is left pining for musical closure, livid that a sparkling performance should terminate with an insipid ringtone. It might be forgiven, however, if it was an intentional act of musical humour. In Sweet Anticipation, David Huron provides a richly detailed theory of how and why the audience has particular expectations and emotions about such unlikely events, as well as in more common situations.

Scientists trying to understand how we experience music have long assumed that expectations and emotions are intertwined. The basic notion, spurred by music theorist Leonard Meyer's seminal 1956 treatise Emotion and Meaning in Music, is that the playful tweaking of a listener's expectations engages general brain mechanisms that compare expectations with input from the environment and set our emotional tone accordingly.

At the core of Huron's account is the premise that organisms derive an evolutionary benefit from being able to predict how their environments will behave. In other words, we internalize the probabilities with which certain events follow other events in everything we do. If I tell my employer I want a raise, there are certain probabilities associated with getting what I want, being ignored or getting fired. My life experiences and understanding of the situation will guide my actions and shape my expectations. Music is no exception. Every time we listen to a blues song or a piano concerto, our brains pick up on the underlying statistics regarding which notes tend to occur together or follow one another in these different styles. We use this accumulated knowledge to appraise unfamiliar pieces of music or different performances of well-known songs. In short, our expectations are an outcome of statistical learning.

Huron does an excellent job of illustrating that there are different varieties of expectation, and that they unfold in time and across different timescales. Expectations are dynamic and shape emotions from one moment to the next. Most of the neuroscientific details of this interplay have yet to be worked out, but Huron provides a compelling framework that is likely to shape research agendas for years to come.

Composers often play with our expectations to alter our emotional response to a piece of music. Credit: ARCHIVBERLIN FOTOAGENTUR/ALAMY

Perhaps the most far-reaching aspects of the book relate to Huron's wedding of contemporary research topics: the cognitive psychology of statistical learning and large-scale statistical analyses of music. The latter topic is important not only for music theorists and researchers, but also for the burgeoning industries of predicting hit songs and customized music-recommendation services. Music researchers face the problem of knowing whether any given piece or set of pieces used in an experiment, from the millions of possibilities, is sufficiently representative to allow broader inferences to be drawn about the psychology and neuroscience of music. Similarly, composers face the problem of deciding whether their compositions play with listeners' expectations in truly original ways.

One solution is to compare the statistics of the piece being considered — how often different notes occur and how often certain pairs of notes or chords follow each other, for example — with statistical distributions from music libraries. This computational-musicology approach allows Huron to answer question after question about the compositional practices of different composers, genres and cultures, and about the listener's perceptions. The issue of whether feelings such as tension, longing and surprise are associated with less probable musical events is addressed empirically with various examples that simultaneously inform the musical novice about the inner workings of music, and provide the music theoretician with an empirical link between the structure and function of specific compositional practices. As someone who finds Wagner's music difficult to listen to, I realize that my listening experiences would have benefited long ago from reading Huron's concise and insightful treatment of the compositional styles of Wagner, Schoenberg and Stravinsky.

Lest the reader believe that a few improbable examples have been chosen to link statistics, expectation and emotion, Huron offers several variations on the theme. Some, such as explanations of why large melodic intervals (jumps in pitch) tend to go upwards and are followed by smaller steps in the opposite direction, will appeal mainly to music theoreticians and psychologists; others, such as why we grow to like certain pieces of music, why the music of other cultures sounds strange, and the phenomenon of perfect pitch, have broader appeal. Huron's treatment of perfect pitch — the ability to name an isolated note without any referent — is particularly refreshing and insightful. This phenomenon is one aspect of the psychology of music that has garnered considerable public and scientific attention. Huron subtly questions the utility of absolute pitch, suggesting that we may have lost this ability over our evolutionary history because the adaptive pressures of our musical environments support listening to and producing music in terms of relative, rather than absolute, pitch.

Many such intellectual provocations take the reader on a fascinating journey into the inner workings of music and how it tickles the human mind.