Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation [Paperback]

Finally, a real five-star book about music. For some reason, there are thousands of books about language, but almost no serious ones analyzing the biology and psychology of humanity's other communication systesms. Every society has a highly developed musical tradition, every society uses music in countless ways including the most sacred religious ceremonies, and yet hardly anyone has stepped forward to analyze it as a basic communication channel for humans.
David Huron's book is on surprise in music. He shows how music creates expectations of pattern, from simple rhythm up to very complex patterns (the concerto, the symphony...) that only sophisticated listeners know. Musicians notoriously love to play with these patterns, to surprise the listeners and thus create new pieces and prevent boredom. Huron distinguishes several types of surprise, on the basis of a highly sophisticated evolutionary and cognitive psychology as well as an astounding knowledge of music. He knows everything from the complexities of Beethoven and Schoenberg to the joik songs of the Saami of arctic Europe, and even knows what happens when you play the latter to rural folk in southern Africa. By contrast, such earlier works as Robert Jourdain's MUSIC, THE BRAIN AND ECSTASY were greatly limited by confining their attention to western classical and classical-derived pop forms, thus missing everything from cross-rhythms to alternative scales.
Surprise presupposes a whole file of knowledge of patterns and schemas, and a deep cognitive and emotional investment in same. Huron takes these mostly for granted. Obviously, the next step is to figure out why people love complicated musical patterns in the first place. Especially, humans love the theme-and-variation type of play with patterns that dominates music from Elizabethan lute solos to jazz to ragas. These are not exactly surprising, especially when you know the pieces, but they are always delightful. Why? Huron mentions body rhythms, speech rhythms, and the like. There is obviously more. I think there is much more about pattern--in music and in general--that we need to study.

Sweet Anticipation should be required reading for all composers and musicologists. The book plausibly explains how and why music affects human emotions, and it also contains numerous practical factoids that can be used to gauge one's own works against the spectrum of human musical perception. Huron uses statistical analysis and a deep knowledge of recent experimental progress in the psychology of musical perception to paint a picture that goes far beyond often banal music theory. His theories apply to all existing musical traditions, which to me is one of the most interesting aspects of the book, since most music theorists are pathetically myopic when it comes to assessing music as a universal human phenomenon.

This is certainly the best music theory book that I've read in many, many, years. It takes many things that performing musicians intuitively know to be true, and puts them into a more rigorous experimental context than musicians normally use. This being said, the book is probably not that accessible to anyone who does not yet have an undergrad level grasp of classical music theory - if you don't know what a ii-V-I progression is, or you can't see the shape of a melody by looking at an printed musical example, you probably won't get much out of it.

Highly recommended!

I really like this book, but I don't think I'm qualified to review it. However, I think you can get a sense of whether you might be interested in it by reading the list of chapter titles and some of the subtitles and descriptions of some of the tables (T) and figures (F), so here's that:

1 Introduction

Emotional Consequences of Expectations

Tension Response

Imagination Response

Prediction Response

Reaction Response

Appraisal Response

T1.1 Response systems

F1.1 Schematic diagram of the time-course of the "ITPRA" theory of expectation.

2 Surprise

F2.1 Schematic diagram of the brain mechanisms involved in the fear response.

Contrastive Valence

Three Flavors of Surprise

3 Measuring Musical Expectation

F3.1 Average moment-to-moment uncertainty for Balinese and American musicians listen to an unfamiliar traditional Balinese melody.

4 Auditory Learning

F4.1 Average response times for musician listeners to hear an isolate tone as a specified scale degree.

F4.5 Sample exposure stimuli showing the long-term statistical probabilities of pitch-to-pitch transitions.

5 Statistical Properties of Music

F5.1 Frequency of occurrence of melodic intervals in notated sources for folk and popular melodies from ten cultures.

F5.2 Proportion of non-unison melodic intervals that ascend in pitch.

T5.1 Probabilities for step-step- movements in a large sample of Western and non-Western musics.

F5.3 Watt's (1924) analysis of intervals in Schubert Lieder. Larger intervals are more likely to be followed by a change of melodic direction than small intervals.

F5.5 Number of instances of various melodic leaps found in a cross-cultural sample of melodies.

F5.6 Average contour for 6,364 seven-note phrases taken from The Essen Folksong Collection (Schaffrath 1995).

6 Heuristic Listening

F6.1 "Brownian" or "random walk" melody.

F6.2 "Johnson" or "white noise" melody.

7 Mental Representation of Expectation (I)

F7.2 Information theoretic analysis of "Pop Goes the Weasel" showing changing of information (in bits) as the piece unfolds.

F7.4 A hypothetical mental network for pitch-related representation.

F7.5 Four objects illustrating the failure to code spatial interval.

8 Prediction Effect

Exposure Effect

The Role of Consciousness

9 Tonality

T9.1 Scale Degree Qualia

F9.1 Distribution of scale tones for a large sample of melodies in major keys (>65,000 notes).

F9.2 Distribution of scale tones for a large sample of melodies in minor keys (>65,000 notes).

T9.2 First-order scale-degree probabilities (diatonic continuations)

T9.3 First-order scale-degree probabilities (chromatic continuations)

F9.7 Schematic illustration of scale-degree successions for major key-melodies

F9.9 Schematic illustration of the amount of flexibility or (conversely) tendency for different scale degrees in major-key contexts.

10 Expectation in Time

F10.2 Effect of temporal position on accuracy of pitch judgment.

Long-Range Contingent Expectations

The Pleasures of the Downbeat

Nonperiodic Temporal Expectations

F10.13 Graph representing the relative durations of three-note rhythmic patterns.

F10.14 Relative durations for two 3-note rhythms tapped by musicians.

F10.15 Categorical boundaries between various perceived three-note rhythms.

11 Genres, Schemas, and Firewalls

Context Cueing

Undergeneralization

Starting Schema

T11.1 Unprimed listener expectations

Schema Switching

12 Mental Representation of Expectation (II)

Episodic Memory

F12.1 Recognition measurements for the openings of four melodies.

Dynamic Expectations

F12.2 Example of a chimeric melody where one melody elides into another.

Conscious Expectations

13 Creating Predictability

Veridical Familiarity

Schematic Predictability

The Anticipation

Hypermetric Anticipation

F13.9 Schematic illustration of chord progressions in a sample of baroque music.

F13.11 Schematic illustration of chord progressions in a sample of seventy Western popular songs ...

Style and form

Dynamic Predictability

14 Creating Surprise

T14.1 Reported qualia for chromatic median chords in a major key context

T14.2 Reported qualia for chromatic median chords in a minor key context

T14.3a Metrical context for ascending melodic intervals

T14.3b Metrical context for descending melodic intervals

15 Creating Tension

The Feeling of Anticipation

The Suspension

F15.3 Prototypical suspension.

T15.1 Summary expectation analysis of a suspension

F15.4 Oddball event.

F15.5 Oddball event from figure 15.4 is transformed into an appoggiatura.

T15.2 Summary expectation analysis of an oddball note

T15.3 Summary expectation analysis of an appoggiatura

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Sweet Anticipation --- The Role of Consciousness

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