Sweet anticipation: music and the psychology of expectation

Term sweet anticipation is defined as “the positive feelings that arise from conscious thought about some future event”. As such, the term constitutes a rather strange choice of title for a book that focuses to a large extent on unconscious processes involved in musical expectation. Presumably, the intention was to place emphasis on “positive feelings ” since this account differs from most written by researchers in music cognition in terms of the prominence it gives to music’s ability to invoke pleasure. However, Huron’s approach is distinctive in other ways. The prominence given to psychological theories, mod-els and methods as tools for understanding music will come as no surprise for those familiar with his…