ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates how listeners’ responses evolve as a melody is heard repeatedly, using the zygonic model of implication and expectation in music. Expectations are judged retrospectively, using data gathered through a device that enables listeners to register the perceived strength of expectation that a given musical event engenders in them by moving a finger left or right along a touch-sensitive ribbon that yields MIDI data. The categorisation of musical structure as events, groups or frameworks, and identifying which of these different responses pertain to, permits sophisticated psychomusicological analyses to be undertaken. Through such analyses, relatively simple data, derived from listeners’ intuitive reflections as to how expected they perceived notes to have been, are used to build sophisticated theories as to the changing nature of their aesthetic response to a melody as it is heard repeatedly. The resulting mathematical models show that listeners’ cognition of music is dominated by relationships that are perceived between events within a hearing, and that the veridical memories deriving from earlier exposure to a performance have relatively little impact when it comes to the expectancies generated by patterns of notes.
