Society for Music Theory

Review: Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation

Author(s): Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis
Source: Music Theory Spectrum , Vol. 34, No. 2 (Fall 2012), pp. 145-148
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Music Theory
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/mts.2012.34.2.145

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 reviews
Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation.
By David Huron. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press,
2006, xii þ 462 pages.
reviewed by elizabeth hellmuth margulis
In his farewell address as President of the Society for Music
Theory, Justin London articulated a vision for the future of
music theory, arguing that work within the field should aim to
be accessible and meaningful to people beyond the discipline.1
He framed it, partially, as a matter of survival in an economic
downturn. David Huron’s Sweet Anticipation: Music and the
Psychology of Expectation makes such interdisciplinarity seem less
a matter of economic and more a matter of intellectual survival.
Winner of the SMT’s Wallace Berry Award in 2007, it has been
reviewed by publications that reach as far outside the field as The
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,2 Philosophical Psychology,3
and Nature.4 In examining the mechanisms of expectation
during music listening, Huron does not stop at the traditional
axioms and assumptions that form the conventional boundaries
of music theory, but looks beyond them, further and further,
until he is in the realm of psychology and even biology. This
truly singular book starts by exploring an old and central concept
in music theory—expectation—and by relentlessly pursuing this
concept ends up opening fundamental questions about aesthetic
and emotional experience, human learning and memory, and
communication and cross-culturalism. In the process, Huron
does the discipline of music theory a great service by taking its
materials and showing how they relate to larger intellectual
discourses in society. And if music theory is to improve the ratio
between its export of ideas to other disciplines and its import of
ideas from them, it will need more books such as this one.
The scope of Huron’s accomplishments has its roots in the
honesty and directness with which he articulates the intellectual
foundations of his project. ‘‘Any theory of musical expectation,’’
Huron concedes, ‘‘necessarily presupposes a general theory of
expectation’’ (3). Although it might easily be recognized that every
musical theory presupposes one or more such general theories,
these dependencies are rarely made explicit. Huron not only
acknowledges this relationship in the opening pages of his book,
but also works straightaway to develop the general theory that will
ground his account of musical expectations. The resultant product,
the ITPRA theory, systematically links elements of musical
experience as diverse as chills, giggles, and boredom to some of
their underlying causes within a general psychology of expectation.
A recent article in this journal examines the way in which
usages of the term ‘‘expectation’’ are often ontologically
1 London (2009).
2 Benjamin (2007).
3 Schmuckler (2008).
4 Janata (2006).
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145
underspecified, even in extremely sophisticated and satisfying
music analyses.5 Huron, by contrast, is careful to define and
ground all of his terms in concrete, real-world phenomena:
human behavioral tendencies and perceptions, or quantifiable
tendencies in particular music corpora. It is easy to argue, in
some cases, with the entities that have been selected for tallying,
or the kind of behavior that has been predicted, but this ease is
one of the work’s essential virtues: because Huron’s claims are
stated so clearly, the reader always knows what is being con-
tended, and what methods and logic led to it. The inner
workings of his argument, in other words, are unusually trans-
parent for a monograph in music theory. This exposure makes it
easier to reach in and find a faulty gear, but this is the kind of
ease that advances a field. People can confront Huron’s claims,
make specific counterclaims, and collect evidence that confirms
or disconfirms them. Over time, this process should result in
faster and further advancement than might be expected when
relatively opaque and disparate theoretical systems talk past one
another.
Huron’s basic theory, the ITPRA theory, schematized in
Example 1, lays out the time course and emotional correlates of
the various stages involved in forming and sustaining expecta-
tions, as well as reacting after they have been fulfilled or denied.
The theory outlines five psychological responses to expectation,
two of which are pre-outcome. The first, the imagination
response, plays a key role in motivation and planning, by enabling
people to envision future scenarios and feel (more than just think
about) their consequences. The second, the tension response,
entails motorically and perceptually preparing for an imminent
anticipated event—intensifying arousal and attention in ways
that often manifest as stress. The remaining three responses are
post-outcome, occurring after the expected event has transpired
or been withheld. The prediction response, conditioned by the
obvious biological advantage of a capacity for accurate predic-
tions, ensures that a person experiences a positively valenced
glow after an expected event, and a negatively valenced pang
after an unexpected one. The reaction response is fast and auto-
matic, well insulated from learning and habituation, making it
possible, for example, to have a startle response to a loud chord
before consciously realizing that it poses no threat. The appraisal
response, on the other hand, unfolds more slowly, and may
include several parts, as the true consequences of a given event
are considered.
Although couched in terms of biology, this taxonomy has real
repercussions for musical experience. For one thing, it can help
explain ‘‘Wittgenstein’s puzzle’’—the tendency for ‘‘surprising’’
events, such as a deceptive cadence, to retain their affective
charge even when they are entirely predictable (because, for
example, a listener has already heard an album twenty times). In
Huron’s terms, the fast reaction response, not modulated by
learning or experience, continues to register surprise even as the
appraisal response affirms the cadence’s predictability.
5 Margulis (2007).
 146 music theory spectrum 34 (2012)
And although ITPRA provides the supporting framework,
Huron raises questions and explores issues that move far beyond
it, into the subtle characteristics of expectation that shape re-
sponses to musical style and individual pieces, that is, into the
realm of analysis. He looks at how schemas can ‘‘partition’’ ex-
pectations, ensuring that certain progressions (V–IV, for
example) can sound surprising in one repertory, but predictable
in another (say, reggae). Or, to take an example that follows
inevitably from the book’s title, he picks apart the familiar figure
of the anticipation, chronicling moment by moment how it
funnels expectations for a resolution onto the next beat, and how
this funneling process is weakened by a variant anticipation
figure that lacks the dotted rhythm (245–47). He then proceeds
to illustrate how this same temporal funneling can be achieved
by pre-downbeat fills in pop music, ‘‘the hypermetric equivalent
of the melodic anticipation’’ (249). Throughout the book,
Huron identifies these kinds of cross-genre musical gambits:
standard ways in which composers and performers take advan-
tage of perceptual tendencies to structure musical experience and
affect. By retaining a broad perspective, Huron is able to find
shared roots between the classical anticipation and the pop fill,
or between expectation-thwarting strategies in composers as
diverse as Wagner, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky.
So Huron’s account of musical expectations goes well beyond
physiology, into the realm of detailed analytic work. Yet he
preserves the biological orientation almost to the last, attributing
a ‘‘positive limbic reward’’ to the anticipation figure’s heightened
prediction effect (246). People have questioned the degree to
which physiology and neuroscience, in their current form, can
explain complex human behavior.6 Larissa MacFarquhar, for
example, chronicled the attempts of the husband-wife team of
philosopher/neuroscientists Pat and Paul Churchland to converse
about their behavior in ‘‘more advanced,’’ neuroscientific terms:
One afternoon recently, Paul says, he was home making dinner
when Pat burst in the door, having come straight from a frustrating
faculty meeting. ‘‘She said, ‘Paul, don’t speak to me, my serotonin
levels have hit bottom, my brain is awash in glutocorticoids, my
blood vessels are full of adrenaline, and if it weren’t for my endog-
enous opiates I’d have driven the car into a tree on the way home. My
dopamine levels need lifting. Pour me a Chardonnay, and I’ll be
down in a minute.’ ’’7
Can physiology and biology account directly for particular
behavioral tendencies, or do they set up the conditions and
parameters for a system of cognition better explained (at least for
now) by experimental psychology? This issue with levels of
explanation seems like it might plague Sweet Anticipation, given
the highly physiological thrust of the ITPRA theory presented
in the opening pages. But Huron is quite comfortable entering
into nuanced discussions of, for example, the relationship
between what- and when-type expectations (expectations about
what might happen, versus when it might occur), without
framing the discussion in terms of ITPRA. The basic theory,
6 Harley (2004); Coltheart (2006).
7 MacFarquhar (2007, 69).
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example 1. Huron’s Figure 1.1 (p. 17). Reprinted by permission of
The MIT Press.
rather, seems to set up a framework for the biological instanti-
ation of the cognitive processes Huron wants to discuss, and so
long as the perceptual tendencies he identifies in more detailed
musical analyses do not violate this governing framework, he is
willing to discuss processes that lack a direct biological correlate.
This leaves room for future work to further pursue the kind
of disentangling of the concept of expectation suggested by
Margulis8 and implied throughout Sweet Anticipation. What
Sweet Anticipation makes clear is that expectations unfold
dynamically in time, can take as their object many different
kinds of musical entities (from a note to a theme to a time
point), and that these expectations choreograph the experience
of musical affect.
Sweet Anticipation’s central claim is that because the essential
function of human cognition is prediction, music processing, as
an action of human cognition, is fundamentally expectational.
What remains for music theorists, it seems to me, is either to
argue that music listening is not by nature expectational, and
provide an alternative account, or to work the notion of expec-
tation deeply into theories and analyses. This was brilliantly
assayed by David Lewin, but since the publication of his 1986
article, there have been remarkable methodological advance-
ments in psychology and neuroscience, providing new insight
into the nature of expectation and perception, and the promise
for even more insight in the future.9 It would be a shame if music
analysts outside the subarea of music cognition did not seek to
weave these ideas into their accounts of musical listening.
It would also be a shame if psychologists did not take Huron’s
ideas into the laboratory. There are a host of methodologies that
could be brought to the questions and theories raised, from
neuroimaging to behavioral tests, but Sweet Anticipation itself
relies heavily on corpus analysis. Huron is the inventor of
Humdrum, one of the first software environments that allows
users to encode data from musical scores in a standardized form,
such that these data can be queried by standard commands or
new, user-programmed ones. Once a sufficiently large set of
pieces has been encoded into the appropriate format, the system
8 Margulis (2007).
9 Lewin (1986).
 reviews
can be used to provide quantitative answers to questions that
previously have only been speculated about: are dissonances more
common in a particular metric position in a particular repertory?
Are the transition probabilities from note to note more constrained
in, say, Bach than in Wagner? Does variety in the usage of
particular rhythmic values increase with historical time?
The corpus analyses Huron relies on to advance his argument
are methodologically innovative and appealingly commonsen-
sical. Most musicians have, at one point or another, probably
intuited that a certain trend might hold across a particular body
of repertory, but lacked sufficient obsessiveness or time to tally
up the data by hand, paging through scores and penciling down
notes; refreshingly, Huron takes such questions, questions that
were previously only hypothetically answerable, and provides
concrete answers expressed in quantitative terms.
Naturally, there can be reservations about the way a certain
question was translated into quantifiable terms, and the gener-
alizability to larger pools of repertory from the dataset available
in Humdrum, but at the very least, these findings provide
a tractable place to begin a debate about what are often very
messy, culturally embedded phenomena. For example, Huron
and Paul von Hippel compared all forty-two twelve-tone rows
used by Schoenberg with 200 randomly generated rows, illus-
trating that ‘‘tonal correlation,’’ as assessed by the Krumhansl-
Schmuckler key estimation method, was significantly higher in
randomly selected rows than in the ones used by Schoenberg
(340). Huron concludes that Schoenberg actively sought to
avoid creating tonal implications, and proposes that his work is
better described not simply as atonal, but as intentionally con-
tratonal (343). Tonally oriented listeners, Huron reasons, lack-
ing the reliable pleasure of successful prediction effects, will
experience ‘‘confusion and discomfort’’ (344). As elsewhere in
the book, behavioral studies could pursue this argument further,
by, say, ‘‘transposing’’ some Schoenberg works to rows with
higher tonal correlation scores and asking participants to rank
the confusion associated with modified and original excerpts.
Huron makes the same corpus-based argument for a contra-
metricism in Stravinsky, illustrating that ‘‘Stravinsky’s accents
are forty times more difficult to predict than a purely random
sequence of accented moments generated using a normative
metrical distribution’’ (346). Huron also acknowledges the way
that expertise in these repertories can cause listeners to build
different sets of expectations, accounting for the experiential gulf
between aficionados and neophytes.
Huron’s focus on corpus analysis, or the systematic exami-
nation of what actually happens in various repertories, is rooted
in his commitment to the theory of statistical learning. Jenny R.
Saffran et al. showed that eight-month-old infants were able to
track transition probabilities (the likelihood of one element
proceeding to the next) in strings of otherwise undifferentiated
syllables, theoretically explaining how they are able to segment
the speech stream in the absence of explicit instruction.10 In
a later study Saffran et al. demonstrated the same effect for series
10 Saffran et al. (1996).
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147
of tones.11 Huron makes the case that listeners pervasively track
the statistical properties of music, and use that implicit knowl-
edge—knowledge unavailable to conscious awareness—to form
expectations.
But, to adopt the perspective of expectational accounts of
musical affect, if composers aim to generate expectations and
then thwart them for aesthetic effect, and listeners form ex-
pectations based on what composers do, then a rapid devaluation
should occur, whereby composers try new things, listeners come
to expect them, and composers must try something even newer.
Indeed, something akin to this process has been theorized to
account for stylistic evolution across time; however, this cannot
be the whole story. People continue to experience affective re-
sponses to Beethoven even when they have become highly
familiar with his ‘‘bag of tricks.’’ Many of these responses, no
doubt, have their origins in mechanisms other than expectation,
but the privileged place expectation has enjoyed in the study of
musical affect suggests that many theorists believe that expec-
tation continues to play an important role even in responses to
highly familiar music.
How is this possible? Huron believes that listeners, despite
possessing impressive statistics-tracking skills, use imperfect
heuristics to deal with musical input, presumably to speed
processing and increase efficiency. For example, although corpus
analyses showed that melodies exhibit regression to the mean
(a tendency to return to a mean or median pitch when
diverging from it above or below), a preponderance of down-
ward over upward steps, and arch shapes (beginning rises,
ending descents), behavioral experiments suggest that listeners
expect post-skip reversal (a change of direction after a leap),
step inertia (small intervals following small intervals), and late
phrase declination (melodic descents at phrase ends). All of
these expectations capture something real about musical ten-
dencies, but simplify them such that they are a sufficiently good
rather than perfect estimation. This slight mismatch between
expectational heuristics and statistical realities could account,
in part, for the lack of rapid expiration in expectation-based
affect. Another possible explanation is the distinction Huron
proposes between the informationally encapsulated reaction
response and the slower appraisal response. ( Jamshed Bharucha
previously proposed a related distinction between expectations
that are veridical—related to the specific piece—and sche-
matic—related to more general tendencies within a style.12)
Furthermore, it is important to note that, according to Huron’s
model, affect stems not merely from the violation of expecta-
tion, but also from its generation (the imagination and tension
responses). The relationship between expectation generation
and affect has been generally neglected in favor of studies
related to expectation violation, and remains a promising area
for future research.
Huron examines several different types of affective responses
to surprise: frisson (chills), laughter, and awe. He theorizes that
11 Saffran et al. (1999).
12 Bharucha (1987).
 148 music theory spectrum 34 (2012)
these stem, in turn, from three separate types of fear-related
behavioral responses: fight (linked to chills via hair-bristling/
piloerection), flight (linked to laughter via panting), and freeze
(linked to awe via breath-holding). In addition to connecting
each of these reaction responses to a biological origin, Huron
provides musical examples of each, ranging from passages by
Schoenberg to passages by Holst and Peter Schickele. He even
briefly treats the role of surprise in impressions of musical
weirdness and quirkiness. But most musical experience does not
entail such overt affective responses as chills, laughter, awe, or
recognition of the weird. Neither does musical listening seem to
be primarily motivated by the pursuit of these particular sensa-
tions. If expectation is to remain viable as an important expli-
cator of musical affect, subtler connections should be drawn
between the stages of expectational processing outlined by
Huron and everyday forms of musical engagement.
Huron’s book is remarkable in the way it tunnels through so
many fundamental questions about musical experience and
behavior and arrives at a general theory of the psychology of
expectation. As the famous Vincent van Gogh line goes, ‘‘If one
is master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has at
the same time, insight into and understanding of many
things.’’13 Sweet Anticipation shows music theory how, in taking
its own problems seriously, it can find itself interfacing with
central questions in the humanities and sciences writ large. This
broad engagement yields a sense throughout the book of real
intellectual ferment; when I assign chapters in class, students
invariably report it was their favorite read of the semester.
Moreover, whatever the reader thinks about the intellectual
approach to music embodied by the book, its assumptions and
foundational principles are always clear. This grounding makes
it possible for people with different backgrounds to read and
understand the material, increasing the chances of its dissemi-
nation and impact on other areas of inquiry. In this way, Sweet
Anticipation provides a superlative example of music theory that
goes deep into musical listening and in so doing reaches out to
the world.
works cited
Benjamin, William. 2007. Review of Sweet Anticipation: Music
and the Psychology of Expectation by David Huron. The Journal
of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65 (3): 333–35.
Bharucha, Jamshed J. 1987. ‘‘Music Cognition and Perceptual
Facilitation: A Connectionist Framework.’’ Music Perception
5 (1): 1–30.
Coltheart, Max. 2006. ‘‘Perhaps Functional Neuroimaging Has
Not Told Us Anything About the Mind (So Far).’’ Cortex
42 (3): 422–27.
Harley, Trevor A. 2004. ‘‘Does Cognitive Neuropsychology
Have a Future?’’ Cognitive Neuropsychology 21 (1): 3–16.
13 Van Gogh ([1937] 1995, 33).
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Janata, Petr. 2006. ‘‘Hitting the Right Note.’’ Review of Sweet
Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation by David
Huron. Nature 443 (7107): 29–30.
Lewin, David. 1986. ‘‘Music Theory, Phenomenology, and
Modes of Perception.’’ Music Perception 3 (4): 327–92.
Repr. in Studies in Music with Text. Oxford Studies in
Music Theory. 53–108. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2006.
London, Justin. 2009. ‘‘Farewell Address as President of the
Society for Music Theory.’’ Paper presented at the Thirty-
Second Annual Meeting of the Society for Music Theory, 28
October–1 November, Montreal.
MacFarquhar, Larissa. 2007. ‘‘Annals of Science: Two Heads.’’
The New Yorker, 12 February: 58–69.
Margulis, Elizabeth Hellmuth. 2007. ‘‘Surprise and Listening
Ahead: Analytic Engagements with Musical Tendencies.’’
Music Theory Spectrum 29 (2): 197–217.
Saffran, Jenny R., Richard N. Aslin, and Elissa L. Newport.
1996. ‘‘Statistical Learning by 8-Month-Old Infants.’’
Science 274 (5294): 1926–28.
Saffran, Jenny. R., Elizabeth K. Johnson, Richard N. Aslin, and
Elissa L. Newport. 1999. ‘‘Statistical Learning of Tone
Sequences by Human Infants and Adults.’’ Cognition 70
(1): 27–52.
Schmuckler, Mark A. 2008. Review of Sweet Anticipation: Music
and the Psychology of Expectation by David Huron.
Philosophical Psychology 21 (1): 137–42.
Van Gogh, Vincent. [1937] 1995. Dear Theo: The Autobiography
of Vincent van Gogh. Ed. Irving Stone and Jean Stone. New
York: Plume.
Music Theory Spectrum, Vol. 34, Issue 2, pp. 145–148, ISSN 0195-6167,
electronic ISSN 1533-8339. © 2012 by The Society for Music Theory. All
rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or
reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s
Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/
reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/mts.2012.34.2.145