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 influence how meaning is shaped in everyday musical experience. The paper analyzes expectation, 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 different contributions to the perceptual experience of music and, therefore, to the meaning 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), perception goes beyond a simple reception of information; it is a process in which interpretations 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 meaning 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 meaning framed in the particular moment and context. Music may be something familiar, emotionally powerful, or have a specific musical meaning (like being in sonata form or the song of a famous songwriter). Interestingly, at the perceptual level, listeners do not need to consciously reflect on their experience 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 phenomenological understanding of the human perceptual structures of consciousness, an interesting way to engage in this inquiry is by investigating the main mental 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 experience 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 acoustical 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 unfolding of the perceptual act. In its broader sense, expectation may be considered 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 expectations about the future of the ongoing music or incoming sound events, thus influencing both the way relationships between sounds are made and the meaning (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 listeners 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 relationships between musical sounds and their frequency of occurrence. Following this perspective, a musical meaning is the product of expectation 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 listener 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 expectation – is arrested or inhibited. In a tonal context, for example, listeners develop 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 fulfilment or violation of an expectation may arise in the listener particular emotions. 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 musical experience. Due to the way it is con- structed, the work sets up some work-specific expectations that are then violated. For example, the Symphony’s main theme – appearing again in the second movement – contains an isolated fortissimo chord, which does not commonly occur in slow, quiet music. This isolated chord causes a sense of surprise – a cognitively ‘simple’ emotion, and a common response to unex- pected stimuli that may be followed by other emotions such as fear, joy, or sadness. An important factor contributing to the surprise is the composer’s previous introduction of this theme without the presence of the fortissimo chord.

FIG. 1 Main theme from J. Haydn’s Symphony n° 94 (‘Surprise’), second movement (Andante), [Huron (2006), p. 278].

In Vuust and Frith’s opinion, “musical expectation is a good candidate for the fundamental mechanism guiding the experience of musical meaning as well as emotion” [(2008), p. 600]. In particular, Expectation and Anticipation As Key Elements for… 153

…most music theoreticians consider musical anticipation as one of the principal means by which music conveys meaning and emotion. According to this point of view, understanding music is related to the anticipatory interplay between lo- cal auditory events and a deeper structural layer partly inherent in the music itself, and partly provided by mental structures in the listeners that is induced by music. In short, the musical experience is dependent on the structures of the actual music, as well as on the expectations of the interpreting brain. These expectations are dependent on long-term learning of musical structures (culture- dependent statistical learning), familiarity with a particular piece of music, and short-term memory for the immediate musical history while listening to a musical piece, as well as on deliberate listening strategies. Brain structures underly- ing musical expectation are thus shaped by culture, as well as by personal listening history and musical training [Vuust & Frith (2008), p. 599].

The authors not only suggest the relevance of expectation for the constitution of meaning, but indicate most of the aspects that influence the process: sub- jectivity, formal musical structures, learning and culture, memory and temporal development. The basic idea is that meaning in music is constituted in real-time dynamic processes, and expectation is particularly relevant in determining such a meaning. What becomes apparent is that these authors – like many others – use not only the term ‘expectation’ but even ‘anticipation’ without clearly distin- guishing them. In what follows, refraining from an extensive discussion on musical expectation theories and empirical studies, I will question the ana- lytical terms anticipation and expectation with the aim to provide a helpful distinction for a better comprehension of the way cognitive principles influence the subject’s musical experience and the constitution of meaning.

III. EXPECTATION VERSUS ANTICIPATION

In the Glossary of his book Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation, David Huron gives the following definition of ‘anticipation’: “1. The subjective experience accompanying a strong expectation that a particular event will occur; also referred to as the feeling of anticipation. 2. In Western music theory, a type of melodic embellishment in which an expected note is immediately preceded by the same pitch. E.g. The “ta” in the “ta-dah” cadence” [(2006), p. 409]. He also relates ‘anticipation’ to ‘premonition’, which he defines as “a long-range feeling of anticipation” [(2006), p. 418]. In the glossary we do not find a definition of ‘expectation’, even though both expectation and anticipation are fundamental concepts in Huron’s theory. They both appear in the title of his work (Sweet Anticipation. Music and the Psychology of Expectation) in a way that suggests Huron views anticipation as a particular kind (sweet anticipation) or part of a general process of expec- 154 Elisa Negretto tation (for which there is a ‘psychology of’). Through a careful analysis of the book, it emerges that ‘sweet anticipation’ has a specific technical definition: it refers to the positive feelings that arise from conscious thought about some future events, such as the thought of attending a concert. Hence, it is considered as a special subset of expectation. Unfortunately, Huron did not dwell too much on particular types of expectation; overall the subject matter of his book is better identified by the subtitle Music and the Psychology of Expectation. However, the very presence of a definition of ‘anticipation’ means that Huron makes a distinction between the two terms in question, even though they are not clearly distinguished in his work. One wonders what kind of distinction he makes and how this distinction may be relevant to a better comprehension of the musical experience. Clearly, they are part of a general tendency of human beings to plan for the future. In generating them, individuals expect their plans to come to fruition since they are both part of the subject’s intentional movement towards the future. I suggest that, in a broader sense, expectation refers to a complex mental process that is fundamental for the comprehension of music. In its narrow sense, expectation is a mental state of suspense about what is going on, during which a range of probable events are expected to happen. Anticipation is a particular moment during the process of expectation: it is the moment in which listeners represent in their mind how precisely the music will go on. The specificity of expectation versus anticipation can be better explained by analysing empirical studies in the field of cognitive psychology of music that focus on musical expectation with the support of the phenomenological account of the temporal structure of human consciousness: the descrip- tion of the structure of the temporal flow of consciousness which allows for the perception of enduring objects as they are experienced by the subject [Husserl (1893-1917)]. An aspect of the perceptual experience of music, which is at the basis of the constitution of subjective musical meanings, is its structural unfolding in time. Listeners constitute their perceptual comprehension of music during its temporal development; that is, the moment-to-moment unfolding of sound events (e.g. a note, a noise or a sequence of sounds) that occur in their living auditory environment. The temporal structure of human consciousness seems to develop itself at two levels of complexity. At the first level, due to the movement of reten- tion-primal impression-protention, the listener is able to perceive a sequence of acoustic events as an enduring object. Such events are thus experienced as a unity persisting in time. At the second level, memories of past experiences and expectations about the future are involved in order to constitute the meaning which that experienced object has for the subject. Both levels of complexity are part of the perceptual act and, thanks to the contribution of other cognitive principles, they allow for a meaningful organization of sounds in Expectation and Anticipation As Key Elements for… 155 time. These two levels are strictly related: secondary memory and expectation elaborate and solidify what the more primitive forms first make available.

IV. DIFFERENCES BETWEEN EXPECTATION AND ANTICIPATION

VI.1 Object of Reference

Expectation and the attempt to anticipate the future can be explained through the phenomenological concept of temporal ‘horizon’, which is part of the temporal structure and represents the place where intentional movement toward an unknown future is developed. At the basis of this concept is the idea that, as Miller writes, “objects are perceptually experienced by us “inadequately”: at any given moment the object is always experienced by us as from a certain perspective, as having “more” to it than is captured by our perceptual act at that moment” [Miller (1984), p. 82]. We have an incomplete perceptual experience that involves an intentional movement toward the possibilities that could fulfil the content of our perceptions. The horizon can thus be understood as a set of possibilities to which the consciousness points during the perceptual temporal experience. It consists of a pattern of recollec- tions and expectations regarding past and future experiences in relation to the present act of perception, whose content continually changes as the perceptual experience progresses. Moreover, it guarantees the subjective aspect of the experience and shows the influence of learning and past experiences. Due to these features, the concept of horizon may be related to the probabilistic aspect of the expectation process, which is captured by the concept of statistical learning. In his psychological theory of expectation (the ITPRA, which attempts to explain how expectations evoke various feeling states), Huron argues that the process of expectation depends upon auditory learning: listeners learn the regularities of the sound environment and they are sensitive to the probabilities of different sound events and patterns. These probabilities are then used to form expectations about the future. Therefore, what listeners expect might simply reflect what they have most frequently experienced in the past. For example, studies have shown that listeners’ speed of response (verbal or otherwise) is faster when they are exposed to musical material that are more frequently present in the music of their culture. Based on the concepts of ‘horizon’, statistical learning and the idea that in expecting a future event there is some kind of reference to its ‘being’, one important difference between expectation and anticipation emerges. I propose that expectation refers to something possible, but not well defined, and belonging to a range of probabilities within the indefinite possibilities of the horizon, while anticipation attends to a specific event in the future which is already known. Sherburne, for example, uses “anticipation” to suggest the 156 Elisa Negretto awaiting of a known outcome and seems to contrast it with “expectation”, which suggests that the range of probable events is known but the unique event is not” [Titchener & Broyles (1973), p. 18]. In trying to understand what ‘having an expectation’ means, Huron addresses the questions: “how precise are expectations? Do we expect specific events, or do we expect “classes” or types of events?” [(2006), p. 41]. He firstly replies to such questions by observing that “one definition of expectation might classify it as a form of mental or corporeal ‘belief’ that some event or class of events is likely to happen in the future” [(2006), p. 41]. The term ‘belief’ may refer to a range of expected possibilities with different degrees of certainty about the occurrence of a future event. Beliefs about the future are evident in a person’s ‘action-readiness’ – that is, changes of posture, me- tabolism, or conscious thoughts that prepare the individual for certain possible outcomes, but not for others. Expectation, then, allows listeners to believe that something will happen and to prepare themselves to respond, but this does not mean that they represent a specific event in their mind. To sum up, expectation refers to a series of possibilities and it indicates a mental state in which the most likely events to occur are expected. In Meyer’s view, expectations are not specific, but indicate a general state of suspense: “what is expected in this state of suspense may not be specified, but this does not mean that any consequent is possible” [Meyer (1956), p. 29]. Listeners sense that something will happen, and although they are not aware of exactly what the expected musical event will be, they are sensitive to a range of possibilities which are built on the basis of previous experiences. Suspense, in fact, is a product of ignorance about upcoming events, from which strong mental tendencies toward the future arise. Huron defines anticipation as the subjective experience accompanying a strong expectation that a particular event will occur: according to standard phenomenological accounts, anticipation refers to the most probable occurrence within the indefinite possibilities of the horizon and the probabilities offered by immediately previous expectations. Anticipation can thus be related to some specific events and the ‘act’ of anticipating them (for example, through a mental representation), while expectation is a ‘sense’ about a future that is not clearly defined. In the framework of the probabilistic character of the expectation process and the statistical workings of the human mind, I argue that listeners develop a statistical hierarchy of possible events that guides the pattern of probabilities and determines their expectations or anticipations. This helps them, for example, to predict the likely temporal placement of future musical events. The hierarchy of possibilities that subjects maintain during their exposure to the auditory environment has a strong subjective character because it is based on an individual subject’s knowledge and experiences. Thus, in the case of very Expectation and Anticipation As Key Elements for… 157 familiar music, listeners can have quite precise anticipations due to the contribution of learning and memory.

IV.2 Awareness and Mental Representation

In order to further tackle the distinctions and similarities of anticipation and expectation, two important questions need to be addressed: first, are listeners aware of their expectations and anticipations? Second, is the object of one’s expectation or anticipation perceived by the subject? Considering the last question first and following a phenomenological perspective, expectation and anticipation are both acts of consciousness, part of a cognitive process that develops itself during the perceptual act. However, they do not correspond to the perception of a future event because such an event is not yet sensorily experienced nor it is present to consciousness. The vast majority of expectations are unconscious; they are occurring all the time without explicit cognitive awareness. The perceivers can, however, be aware of experiencing a state of expectation and suspense about something in the future, which is not exactly known. Because of such uncertainty, the state of expectation does not correspond to a mental representation of which the perceivers can be aware of. We may therefore define expectation as a pre-presentation of future, not-clearly defined events belonging to a range of possibilities contained within the subject’s horizon. It results in a mental state of suspense during which a range of possibilities are pre-presented in consciousness: there is a kind of reference to these future events, but not a present perception of them or the awareness that something specific is going to happen. This theoretical model is supported by empirical studies that suggest that expectation refers to a state of tension about what has to come, but it is not a conscious representation of a specific expected event [Margulis & Levine (2004), Barnes & Jones (2000)]. I propose that anticipation as mental representation may lead to listeners’ awareness of a mental projection about a future predicted event. Antici- pation thus becomes the action of mentally representing a highly expected event or a known outcome before its occurrence in time. It is based on a past experience with similar musical situations and follows a strong expectation. It is not an act of perception because it does not coincide with the sensory experience of the anticipated object (which is not present to consciousness) and it does not have the complex structure of a perceptual act. More precisely, I propose to consider anticipation as a ‘quasi-perception’ of a future event that we ‘perceive’ in advance and without its sensory occurrences in the moment of its anticipation in our mind. However, this approach brings into the forefront the problem of how to consider mental representations. In general, a mental representation is an im- 158 Elisa Negretto age, a concept or a belief. It has a strong subjective character that depends upon one’s own experiences. As previously stated, in the case of anticipation in music, the related mental representation is based on a highly expected future event that is in some way similar to an experience in the past. It could correspond to a structural feature of the music, a particular instrument, a meaning or musical content that are related and determined by the subject’s experience. Thus, one has mental representations of music because one relates a musical event (in the form of an auditory image, content, concept or belief) to something that is or has been part of his/her subjective experience. It is in this framework that anticipation has to be understood. This underlines the subjective and experiential character of the mental representation that listeners form in response to a musical object as a way to anticipate its future ongoing. In the field of music cognition, melodic expectation is generally defined as the tendency to have a feeling about what might come next in a melody or succession of harmonies. For example, if the ascending musical partial octave ‘do-re-me-fa-sol-la-ti...’ is heard, listeners familiar with Western tonal music will have a strong expectation to hear one more note, in order to complete the octave, the note ‘do’ an octave higher than the “do” on which they began. This expectation would be very strong. I propose to consider the general feeling of moving toward a musical goal as an expectation, and the strong expectancy to hear the specific note ‘do’ as an anticipation.

IV.3 Function

Another important aspect which distinguishes expectation and anticipation concerns their function. This is clear if we analyse the way subjects prepare themselves for the event outcome. From a biological perspective, in the case of musical expectation, I, as a listener, feel that something has to happen and so prepare myself to react to it, while not being sure what the ‘something’ is. When anticipation occurs, on the other hand, I not only prepare myself for specific events, but I react to them before their effective occurrence [Zanto, Snyder & Large (2006)]. It follows that expectation has the biological function of preparing the subject to respond to a probable future event, while anticipation allows the subject to act in response to the anticipated event before it occurs. In his ITRPA theory of expectation, David Huron distinguishes five expectation-related response systems that are evoked at different times during the expectation cycle; these are divided into pre-outcome and post-outcome responses with respect to the event onset. The pre-outcome responses are: the imagination response and the tension response. According to Huron, the former has the purpose of motivating an organism, “to behave in ways that increase the likelihood of future beneficial outcomes” [(2006), p. 15]. In im- Expectation and Anticipation A s Key Elements for… 159 agining different outcomes, feeling states are thus activated. The latter has the purpose of preparing an organism, “for an impending event by tailoring arousal and attention to match the level of uncertainty and importance of an impending outcome” [(2006), p. 15]. As an expected event approaches, physiological arousal typically increases, often leading to a feeling of increased tension. The post-outcome responses include: the prediction response, which provides positive and negative inducements that encourage the formation of accurate expectations and evokes feelings in relation to whether one’s predic- tions were born out; the reaction response, which addresses a possible worst- case situation by generating an immediate protective response; and the ap- praisal response, which provides positive and negative reinforcements related to the biological value of various final states.

FIG. 2 The schematic time course of Huron’s expectancy processes [Scott, Tsou, Schmuckler & Brown (2008), p. 138].

As is clear from the ITPRA schema, in Huron’s view expectation is a complex cognitive process that is characterized by very specific moments op- erating in a continuous chain of dependent responses preceding and following the occurrence of a particular event. In order to define ‘expectation’ in its narrowest sense, I focus my attention only on the pre-outcome responses. In particular, I propose to consider both expectation and anticipation as imagination responses that maintain different functions. The anticipation imagination response, for example, is very important to survival: in a dangerous 160 Elisa Negretto situation it is more important to anticipate a specific event that subjects are able to consciously represent in their mind than to expect a range of possible events of which they have no awareness, as would happen with the expectation imagination response. By creating a state of suspense based on the unconscious reference to a range of probabilities about the future, expectation has the function of in- creasing the level of attention about what will happen, and to prepare the organism to respond adequately through specific ‘action-readiness’ and bodily gestures. Based on the ability to represent a highly expected event, anticipation allows the subjects to respond and react to the outcome of an event before it occurs. It becomes apparent that expectation and anticipation influence in different ways the tension response and, consequently, they determine different post-outcome responses. Applied to the domain of music, listeners will have different emotional responses and understanding that determine the meaning their musical experience acquires in a particular context and situation.

V INFLUENCE ON THE CONSTITUTION OF MEANING

Expectation and anticipation respectively contribute (together with other cognitive processes) to the creation of structural and meaningful relationships between sounds. Their intentionality is directed toward future events in order to prepare the organism to respond appropriately or to act before they happen. Both influence the organization of experienced sounds into structural forms, which acquire a particular meaning for the subject (such as that of being a cadence in tonal music). For example, on the basis of segmentation and grouping and creating patterns of tension and relaxation, expectation and anticipation determine when a musical sequence or movement finishes and another begins. In this way they influence the constitution of meaning by connecting the events that form the experienced object in meaningful ways. The difference between expectation and anticipation is particularly vis- ible in terms of the listener’s experience of unfamiliar music. I suggest that one of the reasons listeners might have a sense of misunderstanding in their encounter with unfamiliar music is that they lack the ability to anticipate. As previously defined, expectation refers to the cognitive ability of pre- presenting future events which are not well defined, while anticipation is a ‘quasi-perception’ of a highly expected event. When listeners are not familiar with the music they are hearing, they are not able to anticipate the future ongoing of the musical events from one moment to the next. For this reason, they have a sense of misunderstanding of that music. After sufficient exposure, however, and thanks to the process of learning, they will come to under- Expectation and Anticipation As Key Elements for… 161 stand and anticipate the music they are listening to. These processes, which are essentially unconscious, influence the meaning that listeners’ perceptual experience acquires, as well as their responses to music. Moreover, the occurrence of expectations or anticipations lead to different bodily responses and cognitive states. Because of their different functions and features, they not only determine a different preparation to the event outcome, but also a different emotional response to it that changes according to the fulfilment or violation of both expectation and anticipation. For example, in case listeners form expectations but are not able to anticipate, they experience a state of suspense, which may determine strong emotions in cases where expectations are violated or satisfied. Such emotions correspond to the extra-musical meaning the listener’s musical experience acquires because they are subjectively determined. Two subjects, for instance, may have very different responses and emotional states in relation to the same musical event due to their different experiences, musical knowledge, and the context or situation in which the music is experienced. The difference between expectation and anticipation thus results in different interpretations of a piece of music, different understandings and meanings a particular musical experience may acquire, as well as different bodily and emotional responses in listening to more or less familiar music. It may also explain why some music is more difficult to hear and appreciate than others.

VI. CONCLUSION

In this article I focus my attention on anticipation and expectation in the frame of how listeners perceptually constitute musical meanings. The analysis sheds new lights on the philosophical investigation into the human experience in the living world and in the human processes of knowledge. Determining the way a listener organizes musical sounds, the expectation process contributes to the constitution of meaningful subjective experiences and the realization of the intentional movement that allows a listener to be conscious of music and of a sequence of sounds as having musical meanings. I define anticipation as a particular moment in the process of expectation: it is the moment in which the listener mentally represents how the music will go on. More precisely, it is the ability to have a kind of mental representation of a future event, which influences the listener’s comprehension of music and ultimately may define the difference in their understanding or misunderstanding of unfamiliar music. Further empirical investigation about the specificity of expectation and anticipation (what a listener expects or anticipates at any moment when listening to music) is necessary in order to find more evidence that supports this slight but important distinction. I would suggest that it can be better grasped 162 Elisa Negretto by examining the different bodily and emotional responses that people have while they listen to more and less familiar music. These responses might be different in case listeners anticipate or simply expect future sound events. Studying the way listeners sing along with the music they are hearing could be another way to find evidence that support the distinction I have drawn.

Department of Philosophy Universitá degli Studi de Padova Piazza Capitaniato 3, 35139 Padova, Italy E-mail: [email protected]

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