From “ Sweet Anticipation” by David Huron.
“As musicians we are practitioners of emotion”
“Musicians have amply demonstrated an exquisite scale and evoking the profoundly sad, the twisted absurd, and the deeply inspiring“
In the 1950s, the renowned musicologist Leonard Meyer drew attention to the importance of expectation in the listeners experience of music. Myers Seminole book, emotion and meaning and music, argued that the principal, emotional content of music arises through the composers choreographing of expectation. Mayer notated that composers sometimes are expectations, sometimes delay and expected outcome, and sometimes give us Exactly what we expect. I suggest that, although the music does not contain representational elements, the principal source for music emotive power lies in the realm of expectation”
The story of expectation is intertwined with both biology and culture. Expectation is a biological adaptation with specialized physiological structures and a long evolutionary of category from an evolutionary perspective the capacity to form accurate expectations about the future events confers significant biological advantages, it who can predict the future or better prepared to take advantage of opportunities and side stuff dangers over the past 500 million years or so natural selection has favored the development of perceptual and cognitive systems that help organisms to anticipate future events. Accurate expectations are adaptive mental functions that allow organisms to prepare for appropriate action and perception.
Quotes emotions are motivational amplifiers“
Quotes music, making taps into these primordial functions to produce a wealth of compelling emotional experiences. And this way musicians are able to create a number of pleasurable emotional experiences, including all surprise, chills, comfort, discomfort, surprise, shock, dread, happiness, and even laughter“
How do we manipulate expectations? through the use of tension and release and touch or rather dynamics We have as humans and imagination response. We don’t simply think about future possibilities; we feel future possibilities. Then we have tension response where our brain makes preparations for an anticipated event. Think of a friend approaching with a balloon in one hand and a sharp pin on the other poise for action, the grin on your friends face, suggest that the balloon is not likely to remain inflated for long so you squint your eyes, put your fingers in your ears and turn your face away preparing for an expected event typically involves both motor preparation, arousal, and perceptual preparation, attention. Heart rate and blood pressure will typically increase, breathing will become deeper and more rapid, perspiration will increase, and muscles will respond faster. In addition, pupils may dilate eyes may focus had may orient towards or away from the anticipated stimulus, and thus distracting thoughts will be purged these and other changes help us react more quickly, and to perceive more accurately The simple ideal is confounded, however, by uncertainty – uncertainty about what will happen and uncertainty about when it will happen. Tension and response don’t only manipulate emotions, but they manipulate physiological states.
