Investigating Musical Expectations of Non-Musician Listeners: The Musical Priming Paradigm

Western listeners become sensitive to the regularities of the Western tonal system by mere exposure to musical pieces. The implicitly acquired tonal knowledge allows listeners to develop musical expectations for future events of a musical sequence. These expectations play a role for musical expressivity and influence the processing of musical events. The musical priming paradigm is an indirect investigation method that allows studying listeners’ tonal knowledge and the influence of musical expectations on processing speed of musical events. Behavioral data sets have shown that the processing of a musical event is facilitated when it is tonally related (and supposed to be “expected”) in comparison to when it is unrelated or less-related to the preceding tonal context. Neurophysiological data sets have shown that the processing of a less-expected event requires more neural resources than the processing of more prototypical musical structures. For example, studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging have reported increased activation in the inferior frontal cortex for unexpected musical events. Studying musical expectations – as an example of processing complex, non-verbal acoustic structures – contributes to a better understanding of the processes underlying the acquisition of implicit knowledge about our auditory environment as well as about the influence of this knowledge on perception.