Evaluating the relationship between musical sophistication and melodic and harmonic expectations

Expectations are a fundamental and key factor in producing emotional responses to music; even musically untrained listeners demonstrate musical expectations. This is seen in priming tasks, in which musicians’ and nonmusicians’ categorizations of final tones are faster and/or more accurate when they are expected and related to a musical context (e.g., tonic) than when they are less related. Alternatively, in production tasks, participants sing/play what they expect to occur next in a sequence. This approach is limited to participants who can accurately generate and produce a response, usually those with some musical training. Both priming and production tasks typically compare musicians and nonmusicians without considering their musical backgrounds on a continuous scale or musical engagement beyond formal training. Here, participants completed an adapted melodic or harmonic production task (with multiple-choice responses, facilitating nonmusicians’ responses) and a priming task for the same sequences. Participants’ musical backgrounds freely varied. For production, related targets were predicted to be chosen more often than other targets, with increasing musical sophistication yielding more related responses. For priming, related targets were predicted to be categorized faster and more accurately than other targets, with increasing musical sophistication lessening this difference. Preliminary results offer partial support for these predictions.