Sweet Anticipation

"A richly detailed theory of how and why the audience has particular expectations and emotions... A fascinating journey into the inner workings of music and how it tickles the human mind." -- Petr Janata, Nature "David Huron draws on evolutionary theory and statistical learning to situate the particular issue of musical expectation within the study of human expectation in general. The result is a widely knowledgeable and engagingly written book that will serve as a landmark in the cognitive science of music." --Fred Lerdahl, Fritz Reiner Professor of Music, Columbia University "Sweet Anticipation demands careful attention from music scholars who still believe that experimental psychology is too primitive to speak to their concerns. In unpacking the process of expectation, long understood to play a crucial role in our emotional response to music, David Huron makes a powerful case for a musicology that is empirically informed and statistically based. Even those who question whether musical cognition is as strongly determined as he suggests will be challenged by his questioning of basic theoretical assumptions and won over by his continual emphasis on pleasure as a goal, perhaps the goal, of musical experience." --William Benjamin, Professor of Music, University of British Columbia