Abstract
Formulation and processing of expectation has long been viewed as an essential component of the emotional, psychological, and neurological response to musical events. There are multiple theories of musical expectation, ranging from a broad association between expectation violation and musical affect to precise descriptions of neurocognitive networks that contribute to the perception of surprising stimuli. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic model of musical expectation that relies on the recursive updating of listeners’ conditional predictions of future events in the musical stream. This model is defined in terms of cross-entropy, or information content given a prior model. A probabilistic program implementing some aspects of this model with melodies from Bach chorales is shown to support the hypothesized connection between the evolution of surprisal through a piece and affective arousal, indexed by the spread of possible deviations from the expected play count.
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