Sweet anticipation: music and the psychology of expectation

Abstract

term sweet anticipation is defined as “the positive feelings that arise from conscious thought about some future event”. As such, the term constitutes a rather strange choice of title for a book that focuses to a large extent on unconscious processes involved in musical expectation. Presumably, the intention was to place emphasis on “positive feelings ” since this account differs from most written by researchers in music cognition in terms of the prominence it gives to music’s ability to invoke pleasure. However, Huron’s approach is distinctive in other ways. The prominence given to psychological theories, mod-els and methods as tools for understanding music will come as no surprise for those familiar with his field of research. But the emphasis on taking subjective musical experience seriously, modeling music perception as a process of (statistical) learning, examining music from wide range of cultures and under-standing cognition in an evolutionary context represent characteristic hallmarks of this work. We shall return to these themes in more detail later on. In a recent review of Daniel J. Levitin’s book This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, David Huron notes the advantages brought to a field of study by having a popular champion and laments the fact that, in spite of being in its “golden age”, research in music cognition “has not been communicated beyond a small coterie of professionals ” (Huron, 2006, p. 5). It seems likely that this