Relationship between schematic and dynamic expectations of melodic patterns in music perception

Abstract

Prediction is fundamental in music listening. Two types of expectations have been proposed: schematic expectations, which arise from knowledge of tonal regularities (e.g., harmony and key) acquired through long-term plasticity and learning, and dynamic expectations, which arise from short-term regularity representations (e.g., rhythmic patterns and melodic contours) extracted from ongoing musical contexts. Although both expectations are indispensable in music listening, how they interact with each other in music prediction remains unclear. The present study examined the relationship between schematic and dynamic expectations in music processing using event-related potentials (ERPs). At the ending note of the melodies, the schematic expectation was violated by presenting a note with music-syntactic irregular (i.e., outof- key note), while the dynamic expectation was violated by presenting a contour deviant based on online statistical learning of melodic patterns. Schematic and dynamic expectations were manipulated to predict the same note. ERPs were recorded for the music-syntactic irregularity and the contour deviant, which occurred independently or simultaneously. The results showed that the music-syntactic irregularity elicited an early right anterior negativity (ERAN), reflecting the prediction error in the schematic expectation, while the contour deviant elicited a mismatch negativity (MMN), reflecting the prediction error in the dynamic expectation. Both components occurred within a similar latency range. Moreover, the ERP amplitude was multiplicatively increased when the irregularity and deviance occurred simultaneously. These findings suggest that schematic and dynamic expectations function concurrently in an interactive manner when both expectations predict the same note.