L6 Lecture Series #7: Expectation in Music

Senior Deputy Head - Academic, Mr Richards presented a lecture to the Lower 6 on Expectation in Music. Isabella has shared what the lecture entailed.

"This week we had a great lecture by Mr Richards about expectation in music and the mind. Mr Richards began by explaining the framework which David Huron puts forwards about how we percieve to music. David Huron explains the psychology of what we anticipate from music, in terms of our responses and the biological function of this. For example, he describes the prediction response which is a result of negative or positive reinforcement to encourage the formation of accurate expectations. In addition, the tension response allows us to have optimum attention in preparation for an anticipated event in the music.

We then put this to the test as Mr Richards played various extracts of music while we asked ourselves the five questions put forwards by David Huron as we listened to the music. These questions included, asking ourselves what we think might happen next, what our reaction to the music is and upon reflection if we disappointed or pleased with how things turned out in the music. We found that the first piece of music created much anticipation as the music became louder as it was reaching its climax. This piece of music is described to be like an unfolding of events which causes exitement in the listener. The next extract we listened to be an extract from the composer by Malcomb Arnold. He was a very complex man, he was schizophrenic and people used to say that the speed in which he wrote was extraordinary. He led a difficult lifestyle, due to suffering the death of three friends that year, and so I think a lot of the confusion and ambiguity in his life shows through in his work. We found that he constructed surprise in his music by creating dynamic surprise in his listeners. This was proposed by Mark Huron as a method of creating surprise by constructing the music to suggest a specific expectation, which is then violated.

By analysing this music, we had to address many perception strategies such as, the melody, rhythm and metre, tonality, form and texture. Mr Richards also provided us with the Hevner Adjective Circle to describe music, which dates back to 1937. He suggested that this would be useful for the A level Psychology students to see the kind of descriptors we could use when describing the sounds that we hear when listening to music.

Mr Richards also explained that there is no rights answer when analysing music, it is instead all about deep interpretation. My key takeaway from the lecture is to appreciate the complex way in which music is composed to cause reaction and surprise in the listeners. It can be very easy to be dismissive of the construction of music. However, if we use these frameworks, we can gain a deeper understanding of the concept of expectation in music and the effects of the musical events that take place."