some of my most interesting experiences were in hearing a piece for the first time that confounded expectations. When I heard the first moveemnt of Bartoks Music For Strings, Percussion and Celesta, the strands of music that seem to have a vague emptiness suddenly coalesce into a shattering climax that left me breathless because while it did germinate from the original seeds, it did in a way that was so unexpected that it startled. in a lesser way Mozart continually confounded his contemporaries by having his music go in directions that no contemporaries could pmatch, but always managing to make it seem a natural outgrowth of what had come previously. Mozart is just as origian las Bartok, but the Bartok seems more daring because our brains haven't prepared us for what happens next
Expectation and musical perception
The PBS series "Closer to Truth" did a episode on "How Do Human Brains Experience Music?"
https://youtu.be/1TsitZvvcsw?si=UnTa-wlFnrrFiTnB
in which they explained the complex pathway by which the brain turns perception of sound into recognizable speech or music. Most significantly Prof Elizabeth Margulis of Princeton states that prior knowledge in the brain actually changes what we perceive when listening to music. The whole show is worth watching but at least check out her segment around the 23 minute mark.
What I get from this is that when listening to music the issue of expectation bias is HUGE. If the brain is expecting something it can open the door to hearing it, and the reverse is also true.
I see relevance here to the many on-going discussions on this forum. What do you think?
Some of you may beinterested in Dr. Margulis books or the work of her Music Cogntion Lab at