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Liveblogging Sweet Anticipation: part 1
May. 30th, 2012 02:11 pmok, so this isn't actually liveblogging, I read the first third of the book a couple of weeks ago. Anyway, on to the interesting bits, in no particular order.
* Supposedly, laughter/amusement is an exaptation of the flight response (panting to get more oxygen), frisson (enjoyable chills) comes from the fight response (erecting all your hairs, cat-style), and a gasp/sense of awe comes from the freeze response (one large breath to get as much oxygen as possible, followed by holding your breath so as not to attract attention).
* The book started out as being about the psychology of music and ended up being mostly about the psychology of expectation, albeit with mostly musical examples.
* we have models of how music ought to go based on our previous music knowledge/experiences, but also based on on-the-fly modelling and possibly a general idea of melody and closure and so forth - a betting game where people had to predict the next note for a traditional tune of some non-Western variety showed the group who were familiar with that music did way better than a group of Western music students, but the students still as a group still did well above chance
* There are lots of ways to try to test people's expectations of music. None of them are even close to ideal. They include ERP studies, asking people to improvise the next note, getting people to predict or bet on next possible notes, playing them a bunch of probe tones and getting them to pick the best, head-turn studies in babies...
* the main findings of these studies have been that most people do have expectations of how music ought to go, including that the melody line should on the whole descend during the second half of the piece, a large jump up or down the scale should be followed by movement in the opposite direction, for intervals between adjacent notes to be smaller rather than larger, and for small intervals to generally all move in the same direction. Most of these were tested cross-culturally too. However, these expectations don't actually hold for music (again, cross-culturally). Rather than a large interval being followed by movement in the opposite direction, we actually see regression to the mean. Rather than small intervals generally all being in the same direction, the tendency is for small intervals to move down the scale. And musical phrases follow an arch, not only descending in the second half. So this shows that listeners are using heuristics to form their expectations rather than building totally accurate models.
* Supposedly, laughter/amusement is an exaptation of the flight response (panting to get more oxygen), frisson (enjoyable chills) comes from the fight response (erecting all your hairs, cat-style), and a gasp/sense of awe comes from the freeze response (one large breath to get as much oxygen as possible, followed by holding your breath so as not to attract attention).
* The book started out as being about the psychology of music and ended up being mostly about the psychology of expectation, albeit with mostly musical examples.
* we have models of how music ought to go based on our previous music knowledge/experiences, but also based on on-the-fly modelling and possibly a general idea of melody and closure and so forth - a betting game where people had to predict the next note for a traditional tune of some non-Western variety showed the group who were familiar with that music did way better than a group of Western music students, but the students still as a group still did well above chance
* There are lots of ways to try to test people's expectations of music. None of them are even close to ideal. They include ERP studies, asking people to improvise the next note, getting people to predict or bet on next possible notes, playing them a bunch of probe tones and getting them to pick the best, head-turn studies in babies...
* the main findings of these studies have been that most people do have expectations of how music ought to go, including that the melody line should on the whole descend during the second half of the piece, a large jump up or down the scale should be followed by movement in the opposite direction, for intervals between adjacent notes to be smaller rather than larger, and for small intervals to generally all move in the same direction. Most of these were tested cross-culturally too. However, these expectations don't actually hold for music (again, cross-culturally). Rather than a large interval being followed by movement in the opposite direction, we actually see regression to the mean. Rather than small intervals generally all being in the same direction, the tendency is for small intervals to move down the scale. And musical phrases follow an arch, not only descending in the second half. So this shows that listeners are using heuristics to form their expectations rather than building totally accurate models.
