The DOI matches its Crossref record; 61 of the 61 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Expectation in Music: Investigation of Melodic and Harmonic Processes
Abstract
Expectancy has long been of interest to psychologists and recently has become the focus of research in musical cognition. Four experiments are reported that investigated the formation of expectancies in musically trained listeners and performers. Experiments 1 and 2 examined the factors underlying the formation of melodic and harmonic expectancies, respectively. Both experiments found evidence for the psychological reality of constructs derived from the music-theoretic literature in expectancy formation. Experiment 3 investigated the generation of expectancies for a full musical context (one containing simultaneous melodic and harmonic information) and found that melody and harmony were perceptually independent, such that they combined additively in expectancy formation for a full musical context. Experiment 4 provided a convergent operation for the earlier studies by having skilled pianists perform their expectations for the same passages. These productions strongly correlated with the perceptual expectancies of Experiments 1-3. Taken together, these studies provide evidence for the existence of musical expectancy, as well as delineating some of the factors affecting its formation.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
A Generative Theory of Tonal Music
Child, P., Lerdahl, F., & Jackendoff, R. (1984) · Computer Music Journal · doi:10.2307/3679778 · Cited by 3,751
Norm theory: Comparing reality to its alternatives.
Kahneman, D., & Miller, D. T. (1986) · Psychological Review · doi:10.1037/0033-295x.93.2.136 · Cited by 3,024
Attention And Cognitive Control 1
Posner, M. I., & Snyder, C. R. R. (2024) · Information Processing and Cognition · doi:10.4324/9781032722450-4 · Cited by 2,264
Contextual prerequisites for understanding: Some investigations of comprehension and recall
Bransford, J. D., & Johnson, M. K. (1972) · Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior · doi:10.1016/s0022-5371(72)80006-9 · Cited by 2,131
Remembrance of things parsed: Story structure and recall
Mandler, J. M., & Johnson, N. S. (1977) · Cognitive Psychology · doi:10.1016/0010-0285(77)90006-8 · Cited by 2,085
Meyer, L. B. (1961) · University of Chicago Press eBooks · doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226521374.001.0001 · Cited by 1,957
Bergum, B. O., Rabbitt, P. M. A., & Dornic, S. (1976) · The American Journal of Psychology · doi:10.2307/1421416 · Cited by 1,627
Rosch, E. (1975) · Cognitive Psychology · doi:10.1016/0010-0285(75)90021-3 · Cited by 1,423
DEUTSCH, D. (1978) · Perceptual Ecology · doi:10.1016/b978-0-12-161910-7.50015-1 · Cited by 1,105
Krumhansl, C. L., & Kessler, E. J. (1982) · Psychological Review · doi:10.1037//0033-295x.89.4.334 · Cited by 930
Cited by
Emotional responses to music: The need to consider underlying mechanisms
Juslin, P. N., & Västfjäll, D. (2008) · Behavioral and Brain Sciences · doi:10.1017/s0140525x08005293 · Cited by 1,914
Mental representations for musical meter.
Palmer, C., & Krumhansl, C. L. (1990) · Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance · doi:10.1037//0096-1523.16.4.728 · Cited by 386
Besson, M., & Faïta, F. (1995) · Journal of Experimental Psychology Human Perception & Performance · doi:10.1037//0096-1523.21.6.1278 · Cited by 347
Expectation in Melody: The Influence of Context and Learning
Pearce, M. T., & Wiggins, G. A. (2006) · Music Perception · doi:10.1525/mp.2006.23.5.377 · Cited by 297
Metadata
- Authors
- Schmuckler, M. A.
- Venue
- Music Perception
- Publisher
- University of California Press
- Published
- 1989
- Volume
- 7
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 109-149
- ISSN
- 0730-7829 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W1991000316
- Cited by
- 253
- References
- 61
- FWCI
- 1.52
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Expectation in Music: Investigation of Melodic and Harmonic Processes. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.2307/40285454
- The paper
- Schmuckler, M. A. (1989). Expectation in Music: Investigation of Melodic and Harmonic Processes. Music Perception. https://doi.org/10.2307/40285454
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
