Krumhansl: Emotional response to music is based on deep expectations about the melody

By Bill Steele

Every human culture makes music. It makes people happy or sad, calm or angry. It is used for work and play, for education and celebration. "The variety of music found cross-culturally suggests a deep human need to create, perform and listen to music. But, why?" asks Carol Krumhansl, Cornell professor of psychology.

One important reason, she and other psychologists believe, is that we have certain expectations about what will follow next in the melody. The emotional response to a melody depends on whether, when and how the expectations are fulfilled, Krumhansl suggests.

The idea that musical enjoyment is related to expectations has implications for those creating, performing and listening to music, Krumhansl believes. When something unexpected happens, it heightens our interest. She described research that partially confirms and partially questions a recent theory about how these expectations work at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Her talk was part of a panel session titled "Bio Music: The Music of Nature and the Nature of Music."

While some expectations are based on experience with music, Krumhansl noted, there may also be others that are "hard-wired" into all human beings. A theory about how this works, called the "implication-realization model," predicts "if you have a small interval you expect the next interval to be fairly small. If you hear a small ascending interval you expect another ascending interval. But if you hear a larger interval you expect the melody to reverse and fill in the gap."

By working with colleagues in Finland, Krumhansl was able to test this idea across differing musical cultures. She worked with Jukka Louhivuori, Petri Toiviainen, Topi Jär-vinen, Pekka Toivanen and Tuomas Eerola from the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, and Annukka Hirvasuopio from Utsjoki and the University of Tampere, Finland. Petri Toiviai-nen is a Fulbright visiting professor at Cornell this year.

In one test the researchers used Finnish spiritual folk hymns associated with the Beseecher religious sect in southwest Finland. They compared two groups: members of the sect who had learned the hymns used in the test from childhood and Finnish music students of the same general cultural background but unfamiliar with the particular hymns used in the test. The test consisted of playing part of a melody, then asking subjects to choose which of several possible continuations fit with their expectations.

Sect members who already knew the hymns were more likely to choose continuations that matched the actual melody than were the students. This isn't as obvious as it sounds, Krumhansl said. "It's an oral tradition, not written. Different villages sing different versions."

The research on Finnish folk hymns will be published during the coming year in the journal Music Perception, as "Melodic expectancy in Finnish folk hymns: Convergence of behavioral, statistical, and computational approaches." A study on "yoiks"sung by the Sami, people of the northern Scandanavian peninsula and Russia's Kola peninsula, will appear in the journal Cognition.