Music: How We Second Guess Composers

January 16th, 2010

Found this to be a slightly interesting study. Particularly because when I was a kid I remember trying to convince my friend’s father that I could sing along to any song the first time I ever heard it. Technically that IS true, but for reasons far beyond the scope of my intelligence at the time, and not even close to what my point was in that silly conversation so many years ago.

The premise of the idea below is that suppose you accidentally pulled your headphone jack out of your .mp3 player. What do you project as what is coming next? How is that determined, and how do different people second guess composers differently? Do you have a different view if you have been to hotels in destin fl, or if you are a composer yourself?

A new paper published in NeuroImage predicts that these expectations should be different for people with different musical experience and sheds light on the brain mechanisms involved.

Research by Marcus Pearce Geraint Wiggins, Joydeep Bhattacharya and their colleagues at Goldsmiths, University of London has shown that expectations are likely to be based on learning through experience with music. Music has a grammar, which, like language, consists of rules that specify which notes can follow which other notes in a piece of music. According to Pearce: “the question is whether the rules are hard-wired into the auditory system or learned through experience of listening to music and recording, unconsciously, which notes tend to follow others.” more