Whose Phenomenology of Music?

David Huron's Theory of Expectation

Author(s): Giorgio Biancorosso
Source: Music & Letters, Vol. 89, No. 3 (Aug., 2008), pp. 396-404
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30162999
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Music & Letters, Vol. 89 No. 3, (c) The Author (2008). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1093/ml/gcn015, available online at www.ml.oxfordjournals.org

Review-Article

WHOSE PHENOMENOLOGY OF MUSIC?

DAVID HURON'S THEORY OF EXPECTATION

BY GIORGIO BIANCOROSSO*

DAVID HURON'S AMBITIOUS new book' is a study in the psychology of expectation deliv-
ered in the form of a skilful, seamless amalgam of music theory, cognitive science, and
evolutionary psychology. It combines painstaking statistical analysis of a large amount
of data with speculations regarding the origins and development-the 'psychogenesis,
to use a term in vogue in the nineteenth century-of such common forms of behaviour
as anticipating a desired outcome, freezing at a sudden and troubling surprise, or
reassessing the significance of a misread stimulus. Throughout the book, data analysis
and speculation serve the twofold goal of substantiating a general theory of expectation
on the one hand while illuminating fundamental aspects of the listening experience on
the other. The speculations are cast pretty much within the net of Darwinian and neo-
Darwinian thought, behaviour-including musical behaviour-being understood first
and foremost as adaptive (or as a legacy of adaptive strategies).
The theory itself is the result of Huron's own distillation of decades of research, some
of it his own, on the psychology of expectation. It is lucidly presented at the beginning
of the book and conveniently recapped at the end. The theory is in essence a framework
for understanding the encounter with an event in terms of one's expectation and
response. This encounter is described as a five-step process divided into two phases:
imagination and tension fall under the rubric 'pre-outcome' response; the 'post-
outcome' response consists of prediction, reaction, and appraisal. The five-step process
is dubbed ITPRA, after Imagination-Tension-Prediction-Response-Appraisal (hence
the 'ITPRA theory of expectation'). ITPRA is in essence a plotting of the psycho-
physiological processes involved in expectation and is especially designed to account,
in Huron's words, 'for the many emotion-related elements of expectation. The [ITPRA]
theory attempts to explain how expectations evoke various feeling states, and why these
evoked feelings might be biologically useful.'2 In this vein, imagination or, in Huron's
somewhat incongruous words, 'imagination response' allows one to experience 'some
vicarious pleasure (or displeasure) as though that outcome has already happened'.3 As
such, imagining an outcome, and fearing or cherishing the thought of its consequences,
functions as a motivator. 7insion prepares one for the imminent event through arousal

*University of Hong Kong. Email: rogopag@hkucc.hku.hk.

' Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation. By David Huron. Pp. x + 462 (MIT Press, Cambridge,
Mass. and London, L25.95. ISBN 978-0-262-08345-4)
2 Ibid. 3.
3 Ibid. 8.

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 (motor preparation) and the focusing of ones attention \ perceptual preparation
A prediction response is an emotion that acts as either a reward or warning for having
predicted an outcome accurately (or not), thus steering the organism towards more a( -
curate predictions in the long term. Reaction responses are a direct result of the pleas-
antness or unpleasantness of the outcome. Some are unconscious reflexes ('wired') but
some can be learned. Their primary goal is the defence of the organism. Appraisal
responses, finally, involve analysis and reflection; they nuance, augment, and sometimes
contradict reaction responses, often drawing on social and contextual factors.
My summary of the ITPRA theory cannot do justice to its admirable economy of
means, rich applicative potential, and considerable reach. In a review of this book for
another journal, the cognitive psychologist William Forde Thompson described the
theory as convincing and original.4 I have no reasons to doubt the opinion of a spe-
cialist in the field. I would only like to add that some of the theory's features found
impressive, and remarkably similar, formulations in the work of Husserl (among
others). Huron, however, seems unaware of these historical precedents, as he seems
unaware of the important work on memory by, among others, Frederic C. Bartlett and
Alexander Luria. But while some of his ideas will ring familiar to those steeped in
phenomenology and the early, 'heroic' phase of cognitive psychology, his accomplish-
ment taken as a whole remains impressive by any standards. By persuasively putting
forward a general theory of expectation by way of music, Huron's book will not only
draw the attention of specialists in other fields to the work done by music theorists but
also establish a benchmark for the future role of music in psychological research. For his
theory implicitly demonstrates the significance of music not merely as a heuristic tool
but also as a fundamental and highly symptomatic aspect of mental life.
Having said this, I also suspect some will find the book lacking somewhat in the
kind of fine-grained analysis of actual musical examples that alone will convince card-
carrying musicologists that this is as much a contribution to the theory and analysis of
music as it is to psychology. I do hope, however, that this will not affect the discussion of
the core results of Huron's work. The absence of long and detailed analyses of musical
pieces is most likely a question of time and temperament. Laying out a research pro-
gramme as ambitious and wide-ranging as the one proposed in this book must have
been a taxing job. Huron excels in providing a clear, persuasive synthesis of large
amounts of work done in other fields and thinking afresh about fundamental aspects
of musical syntax, organization, and use. And though his main ideas do provide what
seems like a promising framework for detailed, style-sensitive analyses, the strengths of
his method are most apparent in the discussion of generic rules and widespread con-
ventions rather than individual cases (and individualized experience).
For instance, statistical analysis allows Huron to claim persuasively that melodies
display a surprisingly narrow range of similar features across different-and nearly
all-musical traditions. Statistical analysis, too, suggests that expectation of these fea-
tures is learned and not innate; it is the product of exposure to commonplace musical
patterns. Statistical analysis is the ideal tool for the theorizing of listeners' expectations
because listening is itself statistical, shaped by the (learned) expectation of statistically

4 W. F. Thompson, 'David Huron, Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation', Empirical Musicology
Review, 2/2 (2007), 67-70.
5 See 'The Analysis of Time-Consciousness', in Edmund Husserl, Lectures on the Phenomenology of Internal Time-
Consciousness, ed. by M. Heidegger [1928], trans. J. S. Churchill (Bloomington, Ind., 1964), 40-97.

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registered regularities. Perception of melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic configurations,
concludes Huron, is shaped by 'inductive approximations of underlying objective pat-
terns of musical organization rather than innate Gestalt principles'.6 Huron's emphasis
on the inductive functioning of schemas governing expectation, and thus perception,
demonstrates his awareness of the gap between prediction and reality, a gap that
knowledge can narrow in the extreme, but never eliminate entirely. Though anticipat-
ing certain configurations is not mere guesswork, it is not safely predictable either. Even
a seemingly unproblematic, wholly predictable stimulus may surprise and require a
different interpretation after all. As perceiving subjects, we are vulnerable to the vagar-
ies and irregularities of the external world more than we care to admit. In this context,
if I may be allowed a gloss on Huron's theory, a surprise is a reminder of the precar-
iousness of the bedrock on which all perception rests-the assumption of regularity.
As a metaphor of the ever-present possibility of surprise, the unfolding of music can be
thus said to attain allegorical status.
Throughout the book, Huron's focus is on the phenomenology of listening, the felt
emotional and cognitive experience-the qualia-of music listening: what it feels like to
hear an as-yet metrically uninterpretable chord; to approach the end of a melodic arch;
to predict that a piece will soon come to a well-prepared cadence; and so forth. Huron
always views musical procedures and conventions as a function of a response on the
part of the listener. Listening involves mental representations, which Huron, at the end
of the admirably clear chapter 7 ( `Mental Representation of Expectation'), defines
somewhat reductively but effectively as 'real biological patterns in individual brains'?
It is these mental representations, not some unmediated encounter with physical sound,
that make up the listening experience.8 Huron is able to project, and not merely specu-
late about, a picture of what these mental representations may be like because he has a
theory of the psychology of expectation at hand. His observations about features of
both global design and melodic or rhythmic detail are not tentative, ad hoc interpreta-
tions; they are logically derived from the first principles of his theory. Their final target
is as comprehensive and convincing an account as possible of the emotions that accom-
pany music listening. 'From a phenomenological perspective, says Huron, 'the most
interesting property of expectation is the feeling that can be evoked. What happens in
the future matters to us, so it should not be surprising that how the future unfolds has a
direct effect on how we feel.'9
To a certain extent, it is also from the appearance of the music that Huron deduces a
picture of how one's experience of it is shaped by the 'drama' of anticipation, response,
and appraisal as plotted in the ITPRA theory. Huron deduces listeners' responses from
the theory, maps it on the music, and vice versa. The organization of the musical events
thus becomes 'evidence' for the theory in much the same way as the music functioned
as 'subjective content analysable objectively' in Leonard Meyer's Emotion and Meaning
in Music.1o To quote Meyer in full, 'once the norms of a style have been ascertained, the

6 Sweet Anticipation, 96-7.

7 Ibid. 128.
8 Though phrased in terms borrowed from neurobiology and information processing, Huron's term 'mental rep-
resentation' calls up the idea of tone image or 'representation' (`Tonvorstellung') as first advanced in musicology by
Hugo Riemann. See H. Riemann, `Idee zu einer "Lehre von den Tonvorstellungen" Jahrbuch der Musikbibliothek Peters
fur 1914/15, 21-2 (1916), 1-26. Translated by Robert Watson and Elizabeth West Marvin as "Riemann's `Idee zu einer
"Lehre von den Tonvorstellungen": An Annotated Translation, Journal of Music Theory 36 (1992), 69-117.
9 Sweet Anticipation, 7.
1o Leonard Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago, 1956), 32.

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study and analysis of the affective content of a particular work in that style can be made
without continual and explicit reference to the responses of the listener or critic. That is,
subjective content can be discussed objectively.' 11 Meyer's focus was a selected number
of works in a relatively small range of styles. Huron, on the other hand, works on broad
patterns of musical organization, some of which cut across different cultures, which
partially accounts for why much of what he says hardly fits some of the nineteenth-
century repertory that over the years became a crucial testing ground for Meyer's
thinking. But I believe the general thrust of Meyer's methodological observation applies
to Huron's work as well. Huron himself, however, does not seem to believe it needs
discussing. He is nevertheless acutely aware of the difference between sound structures,
notated music, and experienced sound, as shown in his interpretation of melodic orga-
nization-in particular his interpretation of the expectation of step inertia in chapter
6-and more generally, his warning against 'naive realism, the habit, ingrained in
music theory for too long, of confusing sound structures with experience, and seeing the
experience as reflected in the score.
Sweet Anticipation is, of course, the result of an entirely different research climate in
psychology and the cognitive sciences. Much of the stimulus for the project came from
the interpretation of listeners' responses, a number of ingenious experiments, some
devised by Huron and his former students Paul von Hippel and Bret Aarden, as well
as the statistical analysis of thousands of samples of actual music. Statistical analysis has
influenced Huron's thinking in interesting ways. The idea that expectations arise as a
result of repeated exposure offers a powerful alternative to approaches that privilege
supposedly 'innate, and ultimately unexplained, patterns of perception. I very much
doubt that he would have been able to present the idea without the backing of statis-
tically ordered data. Another area in which statistical analysis morphs into 'statistical
thinking' is terminology and the definition of concepts. Here one sees Huron at his
most disarmingly brilliant and thought provoking. Take, for instance, the work concept.
Huron nonchalantly ignores decades of debate on the subject and approaches the ques-
tion afresh by casting his definition of work against those of 'genre' and 'style'. He first
introduces the difference between 'schematic' and 'veridical' expectations. The former
arise from a knowledge of general stylistic rules and are paramount in shaping the
perception of music one has never heard; the latter arise from exact, or near-exact,
knowledge of how events unfold in a piece one knows very well. Having introduced this
difference, he then goes on to say:

I would like to suggest that the distinction people make between a 'work' and a 'genre' has no
objective basis. There is nothing in the external world that delineates these two classes of
auditory experience. They are not 'natural kinds'. Rather, the distinction between 'work' and
`genre' is entirely a subjective phenomenon; it is probably an artifact of the way human
memory is structured. Specifically, I suspect that what distinguishes a work from a genre or
style is the type of memory coding. What we call a 'work' is a veridical coding of an auditory
memory. If two different musical stimuli activate the same veridical coding we call them
`renditions' (of the same `work'). What we call a 'style' or 'genre' is a schematical coding of an
auditory memory.12

In his discussion of the regression to the mean and pitch proximity, both of which are
very common features of melodic organization, Huron ventures to invoke physiological

11 Ibid. 32.
12 Sweet Anticipation, 263-4.

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and physical factors to explain their frequency.13 Otherwise, he carefully avoids the
question why certain configurations-for instance, the dominant-tonic cadence
became so widespread in the first place. Nor does he treat explicitly an important
assumption, which, if I understand his argument correctly, underpins the book as a
whole: that conventions, once they crystallize, remain in place simply by virtue of
being expected, rather than functional (their function, put another way, being primar-
ily that of fulfilling an expectation). Historical linguists have dealt with this difficult
problem more extensively than any other scholars I know. Their work might well
provide a very useful methodological model, should Huron or anyone else wish to
develop the theory presented here in this direction. Another important, and glossed
over, corollary to Huron's theory is that, in a traditional musical culture, listeners are
agents in the development of musical composition. Through their expectations, they
provide musicians with a shared space in which compliance with, or departures from,
expected patterns are an essential aspect of the practitioner's everyday business of
making, teaching, and discussing music.
It will take more than one researcher to flesh out the implications of the theory set
forth by Huron for musical analysis and interpretation. To do so, however, will require
not only a theory of expectation but also a theory, so to speak, of what it is one is to
expect in music. Huron's book clearly aims at providing the former but not the latter.
What theory of musical expectation the book does adumbrate only extends to basic
rules of musical grammar. Listeners are described as expecting closure, regularity of
metric stress, a certain pitch range, and, within that range, a certain type of melodic
motion, and so forth. This approach has illustrious precedents. In Emotion and Meaning
in Music, Meyer introduces the concept of 'embodied meaning' thus:

[W]hat a musical stimulus or a series of stimuli indicate and point to are not extra musical
concepts and objects but other musical events which are about to happen. That is, one musical
event (be it a tone, a phrase, or a whole section) has meaning because it points to and makes us
expect another musical event. This is what music means from the viewpoint of the absolutist."'

Like Meyer, Huron is, on the evidence of Sweet Anticipation, an 'absolutist'. But as his
words make clear, Meyer is not only at pains to situate his position within a gamut of
possible approaches but also to place the study of expectation and emotions in the
context of the study of meaning and communication. One could even say that, because
of his methodological orientation, Meyer subordinated the study of emotions, and the
attendant expectation mechanisms that give rise to them, to the question of meaning.
Huron, for his part, arrived at his theory of expectation via a different route altogether.
He shows little interest in musical meaning and deals with listeners as monistic actors
rather than as social beings, members of a community (a community, I might add,
defined as much by its shared conventions, and therefore its shared expectancy
patterns, as by other forms of bonding). Near the beginning of Sweet Anticipation, he
writes that

Emotion and Meaning in Music was written at a time when there was little pertinent
psychological research to draw on. In the intervening decades, a considerable volume of

13 Ibid. 96.
14 Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music, 35.

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experimental and theoretical knowledge has accumulated. This research provides an oppor-
tunity to revisit Meyer's topic and to recast the discussion in light of contemporary findings.'

It is the wholehearted adoption of an evolutionist approach, especially its recent

incarnation as 'Neural Darwinism', that sets Huron's work apart from that of Meyer.
On the one hand, this makes a comparison between the two books rather difficult. On
the other, it brings out a surprising similarity. For it seems to me that the explanatory
power of Huron's work lies in the-as yet untested, possibly untestable hypotheses
about the role played in evolution by expectation-related emotional responses. The data
help describe trend and tendencies but, with very few exceptions, do little to buttress
Huron's most innovative insights. For all its impressive presentation and interpretation
of experimental data, Sweet Anticipations remains, albeit in a manner very different from
Meyer's Emotion and Meaning in Music, a highly speculative book.
As Huron reminds us time and again, perception is not so much driven by the search
for truth but rather the need to predict and detect what is useful for survival. In the last
analysis, it is the surviving instinct which is responsible for the 'veil' existing between us
and the noumenal, as opposed to phenomenal, manifestation of physical reality (includ-
ing that of musical sound). Yet like the other arts, music is somewhat 'gratuitous' when
looked at strictly from the viewpoint of evolution. Its goals and functions are defined by
culture. In The Descent of Man, Darwin himself, whom Huron never quotes directly,
broached the subject of the 'gratuitousness' of music and became convinced that music is
the aesthetically autonomous 'residual' of a primitive function tied to sexual selection.
In Darwin's system, the musical organization of sound, primarily as it manifests itself
through singing, is interpreted as a tool for seduction across a wide range of animal
species. Thus the process of sexual selection may explain, at least in part, one of the
most puzzling aspects of the phenomenology of music: the listeners' ability to be stirred
profoundly despite the lack in the music of a putative object of representation. Here is
Darwin on the subject:

The sensations and ideas excited in us by music, or by the cadences of impassioned oratory,
appear from their vagueness, yet depth, like mental reversions to the emotions and thoughts of
a long-past age. All these facts with respect to music become to a certain extent intelligible if
we may assume that musical tones and rhythm were used by the half-human progenitors of
man, during the season of courtship, when animals of all kinds are excited by the strongest
passions. In this case, from the deeply-laid principle of inherited associations, musical tones
would be likely to excite in us, in a vague and indefinite manner, the strong emotions of a long-
past age.'6

Huron does not go so far as to suggest a possible role for music in the life of man's
progenitors nor does he appeal to sexual selection to justify the aesthetic dimension of
music. His goal is to offer a partial account of the persisting power of music by ref-
erence to the phenomenology of expectation in general. Yet the expectation-related
emotions he so carefully analyses are, too, the result what Darwin calls 'inherited
associations'.

Music's main lure, if not function, is pleasure, a pleasure it produces by 'capitalizing

on the brain's complexity, its countless neural paths developed over millions of years

15 Sweet Anticipation, 2-3.

16 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, intro. by J. Bonner and R. M. May (Princeton
1981), ii. 336-7.

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of evolution, and plasticity, the readiness to adapt to change and create new (learned)
ones. As such, music is rather like an imaginary microenvironment, a 'safe haven' where
the mind can exercise its ability to anticipate, respond, and appraise without the risks
typically encountered in the natural environment. With reference to three classic
responses to danger-fight, flight, and freeze-and what he sees as music's three
almost exact equivalents-frisson, laughter, and awe-urdon concludes that ' [w] hen
musicians create sounds that evoke laughter, awe, or frisson, they are, I believe, exploit-
ing the biology of pessimism'.17 Musical surprises, too, play a role in this special ecology.
Though evoking the fear and even terror that we instinctively associate with surprising
events-another example of Darwin's 'inherited associations-a' musical surprise is, in
Huron's humorous aside, an 'effective form of head-banging': it is a pleasure to see the
unpleasant feeling come to a halt, but without the pain produced by actually hurting
oneself. On this titillating view, then, music is a mildly masochistic exercise complete
with its attendant feelings of anticipation, fear, and surprise, minus the physical pain
and in the full comfort of a home or a concert hall, and protected by the familiarity
with one's own culture.
The nature of the pleasure induced by music is straightforward enough. But is the
status of the listeners' emotions equally unproblematic? The environment listeners
inhabit is a safe one because the anticipation-inducing stimulus is, of course, just
music'. Huron acknowledges this, I suppose, by choosing to describe the emotional
impact of music as a form of 'evoking' (as distinct from 'eliciting' or 'provoking, terms
that imply a more direct and irreversible effect on the organism). Even after repeated
readings, 'evoking' still rings somewhat too ambiguously, especially in the context of a
book as clearly and unambiguously written as this one. It suggests a difficulty that
cannot be solved but only acknowledged, for it hinges on the very nature of the type
of (vicarious) emotions described. In this respect, I wonder if 'imagining' would also
be an appropriate descriptor of the feeling states Huron is interested in, notwithstand-
ing the fact that the experiences he describes do have physiological counterparts (hair
raising, goose pimples, etc.). Indeed, there is a great deal of philosophical work that
deals with some of the phenomena Huron writes about under the once outmoded but
now revived rubric of 'imagination'. It will be interesting to see how Huron and his
colleagues respond to this work. Kendall Walton's writings on music, as well as his book
Mimesis as Make-Believe, come especially to mind.18 In the latter, to give an example,
Walton offers an intriguing and elegant solution to the riddle, also raised by Huron in
Sweet Anticipation, of why listeners experience 'suspense' and 'surprise' at passages of
pieces they know very well; why, for instance, an interrupted ( `cleceptive') cadence
sounds deceptive even when the listener is very familiar with the work in which it
occurs. Walton solves the question by appeal to his idea of 'fictionality, the entertaining
of a fictional truth in a game of make-believe:

In the case of a deceptive cadence, listeners expect the tonic to follow the dominant, and they
experience 'affect' when it does not. This may be an accurate description of the experience of
the first-time listener, but what about the listener who knows the piece well, having heard it
many times before-well enough, let's say, to be able to play it from memory or write it down?
Such a listener can hardly be said to expect the tonic to succeed the dominant; she fully
realizes in advance that the cadence will be 'deceptive'. Yet she may appreciate the

17 Sweet Anticipation, 35.

18 Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).

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`deceptiveness' of the cadence as much as or more than a novice listener would. It may 'sound
surprising' to her. . . . My explanation will have been anticipated. It is fictional that the listener
expects the tonic, regardless of what she actually expects [emphasis mine], and it is fictional
that she is surprised to hear the submediant or whatever occurs instead. (This makes the music
a prop in a game of make-believe and hence representational in our sense, in much the same
way that a nonfigurative painting often is.) 19

Huron, for his part, arrives at a different solution to the same riddle via the differ-
ence between 'schematic expectations' and 'veridical expectations'. He suggests that the
deceptive quality of an interrupted cadence persists despite repeated listenings because
`there exist independent neurophysiological paths related to expectation. . . . [T]he
pertinent neural circuits related to veridical and schematic expectations produce dif-
ferent responses. In effect, the schematic brain is surprised by the "deception" while the
veridical brain is not.' 20 Just as one is startled by the sound of a door slamming, despite
knowing it is about to be slammed, so one responds to a deceptive cadence by feeling a
sense of surprise, despite being certain of its occurrence. The 'fast-track brain never
loses its guard'.21 Walton's idea rests on the assumption of active participation on the
part of the listener, a participatory kind of imaginary engagement verging on illusion.
Huron's explanation, on the other hand, implies a passive subject who 'can't help' feeling
surprise at something he or she knows all too well. Huron's approach, it needs adding, is
as unverifiable as Walton's. The claim that 'seals' the argument, namely that the 'sche-
matic' brain reacts differently from the 'veridical' one, is as yet difficult to support by
means of empirical testing.
Are Walton's and Huron's interpretations complementary, mutually exclusive or,
worse, incommensurable? However one may answer, there remains the impression
that Huron and his collaborators have not engaged with philosophical work on the
phenomenology of listening with the same passion and thoroughness with which they
have incorporated the findings of research done in biology and experimental psych-
ology. Then again, given the present state of the art, the methodology underpinning
Huron's book is hardly surprising. Psychology has been leaning towards neurobiologi-
cal reductivism for quite some time. Indeed, the blur between certain areas of psych-
ology and neurobiology is apparent for all who care to see it. As a discipline,
psychology emerged from biology and physiology on the one hand and philosophy on
the other rather slowly and painfully. In fact, the break has never been a clean one on
either side. Anxiety over its scientific status has made psychologists turn to the exact
sciences with unremitting frequency. But engagement with philosophy seems equally
necessary. The nature of the felt emotions experienced while listening to music is a case
in point. As an object of inquiry, they fall squarely within a contested area in which
both neurobiologists and philosophers stake their claims with equal force, a no-man's
land, which we, for lack of a better term, still call 'psychology'.
Huron's ability to show the link between the biologically driven need to acquire
knowledge for survival and the phenomenology of 'hypermetric anticipation, 'tonal
syncopation, and other such specific, highly technical musical procedures is one of
the book's greatest triumphs. I was surprised not to see a reference to what remains
the most ambitious attempt to study the arts in the light of evolutionist thought,

19 Ibid. 262.
20 Sweet Anticipation, 226.
21 Ibid. 36.

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E. H. Gombrich's The Sense of Order;22 but I am happy to acknowledge that Sweet
Anticipations does a better job at subsuming concrete, individual examples within the
theoretical framework-the ITPRA theory of expectation-established at the begin-
ning. Huron's success may be a mixed blessing, however. The difficulty readers experi-
ence in bridging the distance between Gombrich's evolutionist theory and his analyses
of individual instances is a symptom that the inner workings of decorative art, let alone
its function in society, cannot be explained by biological theory alone. While stressing
the biological function of creating artificial spaces whose visual appearance is regular
and thus predictable, Gombrich had to acknowledge that the raison d'etre of the specific
nature of those patterns is decorum, meaning, and communication. Accordingly, he
discussed the latter at length, thus pushing, as it were, the evolutionist theory into the
background. One is left with a book split into two, as it were, its two parts never quite
jelling into one coherent whole. But if anything, this shows that biology merely provides
the limits within which culture operates. Cultural artefacts cannot be explained away
via biological theorizing.
Huron is well aware of this, of course. As he clearly states at the beginning of his
book, his is a psychological theory of expectation. Yet in the last chapter of the book he
makes the suggestion that his specific brand of psychological theory has much to offer to
historical musicology, music theory, musical aesthetics, and ethnomusicology. Huron's
old-fashioned separation between the musical disciplines notwithstanding, the claim
needs to be qualified. To be sure, reframing whole sets of questions through the lens of
such a psychological theory as he delivers in Sweet Anticipation provides us with fresh
insights and sometimes startlingly novel formulations of age-old problems, as the book
eloquently proves. Yet advocating such disciplinary crossover also involves the risk of
diminishing the significance of the gulf that exists between different approaches to the
phenomenology of music and, by extension, culture: the anthropological, the historical,
the philosophical, and the biological. Different construals of mental reality, as Clifford
Geertz reminded us, 'need not converge: [they] only have to make the most of their
incorrigible diversity'.23 While it is laudable to wish that the gulf between all these
approaches be narrowed, it would be naive to wish for it to disappear. After all,
psychology's very existence depends on it.

22 E. H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art (London, 1984).
23 Clifford Geertz, Imbalancing Act: Jerome Bruner's Cultural Psychology, in his Available Light: Anthropological
Reflections on Philosophical TOpics (Princeton, 2000), 199.

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