Music Cognition Matters - Retrospective surprise and prospective uncertainty in the cognition, composition, and improvisation of musical melodies

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The emergence of digitally encoded musical corpora and advanced computational tools such as the Information Dynamics of Music Model (IDyOM) has allowed music scientists to dissociate the sometimes complementary roles of retrospective surprise and prospective uncertainty in the cognition, composition, and improvisation of musical melodies. In this talk, I will review already published and in-progress findings to exemplify this research programme. I will share empirical evidence that explicit and implicit instantiations of predictive uncertainty can be modelled with entropy derived from IDyOM, that these measures can be used to distinguish individuals who have undergone different types of stylistic specialization, and that such musical enculturation is associated with different degrees of explicit processing. Prospective uncertainty informs real-time perceptual segmentation of musical stimuli, resulting in melodic phrases with expectancy dynamics that are shared across musical traditions which exhibit vastly divergent surface features. Differences in the use of surprise and uncertainty, moreover, characterize the styles of three Viennese twelve-tone composers and may be used to distinguish repeated patterns in the improvisations of an expert-level jazz pianist effectuated with high or low degrees of stereotypicality in timing and velocity. Advances in the understanding of the intricate interplay between prospective and retrospective processes in musical expectancy dynamics have implications for basic science and practice within music psychology, therapy, and education.

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