“Cueing” Your Playlist

The abundance of popular music in everyday life has led to the formation of schematic frameworks that are implicit and accessible to most listeners.Accordingly, we have come to implicitly expect and delight in prototypical patterns of verses and choruses as the music unfolds.This study highlights the role of texture as a source of local, perceptual input informing the realtime experience of musical form and climax, which includes the development of schematic and veridical expectations and their assessment.I expand upon Moore's (2012) textural layers with textural cues, claiming that cues spark listener expectations for formal section changes that coincide with texture change.Following a corpus study which compares the use of cues in post-millennial pop with that of pre-millennial pop, I then create my own visual representations-texture models-of Billboard Hot-100 hits that spotlight exemplar songs, categorizing them according to a four-part taxonomy of perceptual climax.Broadly, I suggest that texture serves as one particularly dynamic and valuable aspect of Western post-millennial pop music that aids musical navigation through local cues and clarifies their relationships to other parameters.The cues balance expectational tension and release: whereas their suddenness and novelty induce tension, they facilitate accurate predictions of textural change, resulting in subsequent expectational release and perceptions of climax through the meeting of local and global expectations about pop music forms.