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Expectation and Anticipation As Key Elements for the Constitution of Meaning in Music

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Expectation and Anticipation As Key Elements for the Constitution of Meaning in Music teorema Vol. XXXI/3, 2012, pp. 149-163 ISSN: 0210-1602 [BIBLID 0210-1602 (2012) 31:3; pp. 149-163] Expectation and Anticipation As Key Elements for the Constitution of Meaning in Music Elisa Negretto RESUMEN Utilizando un enfoque multidisciplinar que combina la fenomenología, la musico- logía y la psicología cognitiva de la música, abordo en el presente artículo los aspectos siguientes: ¿de qué manera los oyentes reconocen en su propia experiencia perceptiva musical un significado especial?, y, ¿cuáles son los aspectos principales que determinan el significado subjetivo que una experiencia musical adquiere en un contexto y en una situación específicos? Centrándome en la manera en que los oyentes perciben la música, mi objetivo principal es encontrar los elementos clave que influyen en la creación de significado de las experiencias musicales cotidianas. En particular, analizo un proceso cognitivo especialmente importante para la construcción del significado durante el desa- rrollo de un acto perceptivo: el proceso de la expectación. De este modo, propongo una distinción conceptual entre “expectativa” y “anticipación”, argumentando que una y otra influyen de manera diferente en la experiencia perceptiva de la música y, por tanto, en el significado que ésta adquiere para cada individuo. PALABRAS CLAVE: expectación, anticipación, constitución, significado, experiencia perceptiva. ABSTRACT Through an interdisciplinary approach involving phenomenology, musicology and cognitive psychology of music, this paper examines the following questions: how do listeners become aware of their musical perceptual experience as having a specific meaning? And, what are the main aspects constituting, within a particular context and a set of circumstances, the subjective meaning of a musical experience? Focusing on the way listeners perceive music, this paper aims to find the key elements that influ- ence how meaning is shaped in everyday musical experience. The paper analyzes ex- pectation, a cognitive process that is particularly relevant for the constitution of meaning during the unfolding of the perceptual act. Finally, a conceptual distinction is proposed between ‘expectation’ and ‘anticipation’, and it is argued that they make dif- ferent contributions to the perceptual experience of music and, therefore, to the mean- ing music acquires for the subject. KEYWORDS: Expectation, Anticipation, Constitution, Meaning, Perceptual Experience. 149 150 Elisa Negretto I. INTRODUCTION The human perceptual experience is a fundamental process of knowledge that allows the immediate awareness of an event or object in the world to be understood as meaningful. According to Gallagher and Zahavi (2008), percep- tion goes beyond a simple reception of information; it is a process in which in- terpretations change according to context and may directly be influenced by previous experiences. Focusing on individual auditory perception, every perceptual awareness of a particular sound experience (musical or otherwise) has a specific mean- ing for the subject. Thanks to complex mental processes (such as expectation, anticipation and grouping) and perceptual structures (such as intentionality and temporal structure), meanings are ‘constituted’ in consciousness without the mediation of conscious thought. Related to the problem of where meanings come from, Husserl’s inter- pretation of time-consciousness is an attempt to reply to the question: “how, in a flow of consciousness, is the awareness of a temporally extended object constituted?” [Brough (2005), p. 248]. And in the case of music the question becomes: how is the perceptual awareness of a musical event – a temporally extended object – constituted by a subject in a complex auditory environment? ‘Constitution’ is a concept used by Husserl to explain the origin of meanings [Sokolowski (1964)]. It is an articulated process of consciousness that governs the way meanings come to be – how human beings are aware of their experience in the world as meaningful. In regards to musical experience, through the process of constitution, listeners understand sequences of sounds as music by perceptually organizing them into musical forms. In this way, auditory experiences acquire specific meanings: firstly, that of being musical experiences. Listeners’ musical knowledge and past experiences also concur to form a more complex mean- ing framed in the particular moment and context. Music may be something familiar, emotionally powerful, or have a specific musical meaning (like be- ing in sonata form or the song of a famous songwriter). Interestingly, at the perceptual level, listeners do not need to consciously reflect on their experi- ence in order to be aware of such meanings. This brings us to examine how listeners organize auditory traces and how this organization influences the kind of meanings (musical or extra- musical) that experiences of sound acquire at the perceptual level. In line with the development of the cognitive psychology of music and a phenome- nological understanding of the human perceptual structures of consciousness, an interesting way to engage in this inquiry is by investigating the main men- tal processes that determine the constitution of meanings. First, this requires an analysis of various relevant empirical studies and hypotheses considering what listeners mentally do to hear music: which per- Expectation and Anticipation As Key Elements for… 151 ceptual structures are involved and which cognitive principles are used. The main goal of this paper is to find the key elements that influence listeners’ constitution of meaning and the specific, subjective meaning a musical ex- perience acquires. In this way we may better understand where meanings come from and how human beings know and become familiar with the world they inhabit. II. THE EXPECTATION PROCESS Music is composed using individual sounds that are heard as a continu- ously connected whole. It presents itself as a continuous process in which, at every moment, what people hear follows in a compelling way from what came before. Thanks to specific perceptual mechanisms, cognitive principles and neural processes, listeners are able to find relationships among the sound events occurring in the acoustical environment. In this way they integrate the sounds they hear into a structural whole and thereby understand the acousti- cal environment in terms of musical structures. A specific cognitive process, that of expectation, seems to be particularly relevant for both the understanding and constitution of meaning during the un- folding of the perceptual act. In its broader sense, expectation may be consid- ered as a basic strategy of the human mind that reflects a tendency, an intentional movement toward the future. Such movement is based on previous experiences. During the perceptual organization of sounds, listeners create ex- pectations about the future of the ongoing music or incoming sound events, thus influencing both the way relationships between sounds are made and the mean- ing (emotional, musical or otherwise) their auditory experience may acquire. The majority of theories [Meyer (1956), Narmour (1990; 1992), Huron (2006)] and empirical studies [Margulis (2003), Larson (2004), Margulis & Levine (2004), Unyk & Carlsen (1987), Krumhansl & Agres (2008)] have explained musical expectations within the framework of the Western tonal syntactic system and in accordance with the structural regularities that listen- ers learn through cultural exposures. Many empirical studies have demon- strated that listeners develop some sort of basic structural understanding at the perceptual level. Expectations are built on the basis of syntactic relation- ships between musical sounds and their frequency of occurrence. Following this perspective, a musical meaning is the product of expec- tation when a musical event points to and makes us expect another musical event. In Meyer’s words, “the significance of a musical event – be it a tone, a motive, a phrase, or a section – lies in the fact that it leads the practiced lis- tener to expect, consciously or unconsciously, the arrival of a subsequent event” [as cited in Levinson (1997), p. 53]. Listeners’ expectations are based on the way they connect their knowledge of musical style with probability 152 Elisa Negretto about future events based on statistical frequency. The actual expectations felt by listeners are a consequence of their past experiences. The most well-known theories [Meyer (1956), Narmour (1990; 1992), Huron (2006)] characterize expectation as a process that strongly influences listeners’ emotional and affective response to music, thus determining the constitution of extra-musical meanings. According to Meyer, emotions are aroused in the listener when a tendency to respond to a stimulus – an expecta- tion – is arrested or inhibited. In a tonal context, for example, listeners de- velop a sense of musical expectation that is derived from tonal hierarchies (e.g. tonic, subdominant, dominant). Even in this case, expectations involve syntactic relationships between different parts of the musical structure. The ful- filment or violation of an expectation may arise in the listener particular emo- tions. For instance, the violation of an expected melodic attack triggers a strong feeling of surprise that might be followed by a particular emotional response. Works like Haydn’s Symphony No. 94 in G major (Surprise Symphony, 1791) show how expectations and their violations influence the emotional meaning of the listener’s
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