Tributes to Leonard B.

Meyer

477

T RIBUTES

TO

L EONARD B. M EYER

Leonard B. Meyer, SMPC meeting at Kingston, 2001. Photo credit: Douglas Gifford

Expectation as an Implicit Process JAMSHED J. B HARUCHA Tufts University Few are the occasions in which an idea becomes a focal point for half a century. Leonard Meyers contribution has had an impact on that scale. There is a virtual consensus todayresulting from Meyers workthat expectations and their violations play a powerful role in the aesthetics of musical experience. Upon re-reading Emotion and Meaning in Music (Meyer, 1956), I am struck by the lucid and secure theoretical framework, even though it diverged from the prevailing paradigms in music theory and psychology. It is easy today to believe that the role of expectations and their violation in music is obvious. But it was not obvious then. Meyers analysis implied that many forms of expectation occur swiftly and automatically, and are the result of classical conditioning. Today, we would call such processes implicit, and we would refer to such classically conditioned responses as expectations generated by the activation of learned schemata. Even though Meyer was writing as a scholar of music, he anticipated the cognitive approach within psychology.

Music Perception

VOLUME

25,

ISSUE

5,

PP.

4774 91 ,

ISSN

0730-7829, ELECTRONIC

ISSN

1533-8312 2008

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DOI:10.1525/MP.2008.25.5.477

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Tributes to Leonard B. Meyer

The behavioristswho were dominant at the time eschewed mentalistic terms like expectation, which they believed were not subject to measurement. The early experimental psychologists of the late 19th century had begun to use reaction time to study cognitive phenomena, but it wasnt until the birth of cognitive psychology in the latter half of the 20th century that this method was adopted as a direct measure of expectation. It took another MeyerDavid E. Meyerto demonstrate the use of reaction time (via the lexical decision task) to measure how words prime other words that are semantically related, i.e., how words generate expectations for other words, thereby enabling fluent comprehension of a coherent string of words (Meyer & Schvaneveldt, 1971). How has Leonard Meyer influenced my thinking? Some years ago, while reading his seminal work, I considered how one might develop an implicit task for musical expectation that would be the musical analog of the lexical decision task. Without such a task, it would be difficult to test models of expectation. Some of Meyers expectations come alive within a fine temporal granularity, and entail a rapid generation of expectation followed by a rapid decay. I knew that the temporal resolutions of articulatory onsets in music and language are comparable, so established methods of measuring expectations in language should provide useful clues. Using the lexical decision task, the pattern of semantic expectations can change qualitatively within less than half a second; for example, multiple meanings of an ambiguous word are primed initially, but only the meaning consistent with the context survives after a few hundred milliseconds (Swinney, 1979). A chronometric taskreaction timewould therefore be necessary in order to explore the full spectrum of musical expectations. Tasks that were most commonly used in music cognition at that time were rating judgments and memory judgments, neither of which gets at these expectations directly when used without reaction time. Furthermore, rating judgments are vulnerable to explicit processes; subjects can adopt conscious strategies to guide their responses, drawing on knowledge that varies as a function of formal musical training. In contrast, implicit tasks are relatively impervious to conscious strategies and instead tap into unconscious processes shared by members of a musical culture regardless of formal training. Feeling the pulse of the robust processes that occur at a fine temporal grain without explicit thought would require a priming taska musical analog to the lexical decision task. Finally, because priming tasks such as the lexical decision task employ true/false judgments,

subjectivity is taken out of the equation: subjects respond as fast as they can to make a decision that is either right or wrong, and the ensuing pattern of response times reveals something about the underlying architecture of cognition. Priming (or facilitation) is the cognitive process that underlies expectation. It is the brains anticipatory processing of (or bias toward) things that are likely to occur. If things that are likely to occur are pre-processed to some extent, then if they do occur the perceptual processing can be completed more quickly. Priming provides the temporal glue that links musical events over time: events that are likely to follow are inferred even before they are heard. My students and I tried a number of priming tasks to measure expectations in harmony. We tried a timbre decision, a major or minor decision, and an in-tune/ out-of-tune decision. The last two yielded strong effects (Bharucha, 1987; Bharucha & Stoeckig, 1986), which were shown robustly by musicians and nonmusicians alike: decisions about the target chord were made more quickly if it was expected than if it was unexpected. Leonard Meyer recognized that expectations result from cultural conditioning, so that even someone who intellectually has moved beyond tonal music would still experience expectations in accord with familiar tonal patterns. I remember discussing this with a composer who assured me that he would not show a stronger expectation for related chords relative to unrelated chords; after all, he had long since transcended the Western tonal worldview. So I ran him in my new harmonic priming task. He fought hard to be contrarian during the experiment, and he was chagrinned to see thatas Meyer would have predictedhe was just as much a victim of conditioning by the tonal harmonic environment as was everyone else.