Product Description

Winner, 2007 Wallace Berry Award presented by the Society for Music Theory.

The psychological theory of expectation that David Huron proposes in Sweet Anticipation grew out of the author's experimental efforts to understand how music evokes emotions. These efforts evolved into a general theory of expectation that will prove informative to readers interested in cognitive science and evolutionary psychology as well as those interested in music. The book describes a set of psychological mechanisms and illustrates how these mechanisms work in the case of music. All examples of notated music can be heard on the Web.

Huron proposes that emotions evoked by expectation involve five functionally distinct response systems: reaction responses (which engage defensive reflexes); tension responses (where uncertainty leads to stress); prediction responses (which reward accurate prediction); imagination responses (which facilitate deferred gratification); and appraisal responses (which occur after conscious thought is engaged). For real-world events, these five response systems typically produce a complex mixture of feelings. The book identifies some of the aesthetic possibilities afforded by expectation, and shows how common musical devices (such as syncopation, cadence, meter, tonality, and climax) exploit the psychological opportunities. The theory also provides new insights into the physiological psychology of awe, laughter, and spine-tingling chills. Huron traces the psychology of expectations from the patterns of the physical/cultural world through imperfectly learned heuristics used to predict that world to the phenomenal qualia we experienced as we apprehend the world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #60178 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780262582780
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Review
"Sweet Anticipation demands careful attention from music scholars who still believe that experimental psychology is too primitive to speak to their concerns. In unpacking the process of expectation, long understood to play a crucial role in our emotional response to music, David Huron makes a powerful case for a musicology that is empirically informed and statistically based. Even those who question whether musical cognition is as strongly determined as he suggests will be challenged by his questioning of basic theoretical assumptions and won over by his continual emphasis on pleasure as a goal, perhaps the goal, of musical experience."
—William Benjamin, Professor of Music, University of British Columbia

"A richly detailed theory of how and why the audience has particular expectations and emotions.... A fascinating journey into the inner workings of music and how it tickles the human mind."
— Petr Janata, Nature

"David Huron draws on evolutionary theory and statistical learning to situate the particular issue of musical expectation within the study of human expectation in general. The result is a widely knowledgeable and engagingly written book that will serve as a landmark in the cognitive science of music."
—Fred Lerdahl, Fritz Reiner Professor of Music, Columbia University

About the Author
David Huron is Professor of Music and Head of the Cognitive and Systematic Musicology Laboratory in the School of Music at Ohio State University and is affiliated with OSU's Center for Cognitive Science.

Customer Reviews

Music and Surprise
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.

Music theory that includes the whole world!
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!

Chapter titles and selected subtitles and descriptions of figures and tables
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
Premonition
Climax
Sweet Anticipation --- The Role of Consciousness