Evaluating the relationship between musical sophistication and melodic and harmonic expectations.

Expectations help us navigate our environment, especially in familiar contexts. Western tonal music offers one such context where expectations are at play. While implicit musical expectations occur in listeners without musical training, musical training can sharpen expectations. Two primary open questions are investigated here. First, explicit pitch-based expectations for less musical participants have been relatively neglected. Second, general musicality and formal musical training have not been well separated in previous research, making it difficult to understand if sharpening of expectations is associated with training itself or with broader musical interactions. Experiments 1 and 2 adapted an explicit music production task to be accessible to listeners of varying musicality, as measured by the Goldsmith-Musical Sophistication Index. In the melodic production task of Experiment 1, participants were more likely to select the tonic or tonic triad tones to continue a melodic context phrase, and increased musical sophistication was related to the likelihood of selecting tonic when expected. Sophistication scores were also positively associated with increased confidence ratings in selections for most melodies. In the harmonic production task of Experiment 2, increased musical sophistication trended toward increasing tonic selections and was not associated with confidence ratings. Experiment 3 used priming tasks to assess implicit expectations in listeners who had either low musical training and low musical sophistication, low training and high sophistication, or high training and high sophistication. The two low training groups were more accurate on expected tones than less expected ones, while this was only trending for the high training group. The high training group was also faster and more accurate for their responses than the low training groups. Additionally, across experiments, half of the contexts were scrambled, but this did not have a consistent effect on responses. Results are discussed in terms of measuring musical expectancy, specificity of expertise in music and in general, participants’ musical listening history, and possible underlying mechanisms. Together, listeners with varying levels of musical sophistication (not just trained musicians) can produce explicit expectations, and in certain cases, increased sophistication strengthens expectations without fundamentally changing them.