According to the article "Earworms from Three Angles," philosopher and composer Leonard Meyer suggested that emotion in music is all about what we expect, and whether or not we get it.

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Question

According to the article "Earworms from Three Angles," philosopher and composer Leonard Meyer suggested that emotion in music is all about what we expect, and whether or not we get it.

Notice: This question and its associated answer set are protected under copyright, and may not be reproduced without the author's consent.

BlackTom AI · Accepted Answer

Leonard Meyer argued that musical emotion arises from expectations and their fulfillment or violation, so the statement is true.

1) Relevant knowledge points and concepts
- Leonard B. Meyer's central claim (notably in Emotion and Meaning in Music, 1956) is that listeners form expectations based on learned musical patterns.
- Emotion in music, according to Meyer, depends on how those expectations are met: confirmation, delayed confirmation, or frustrated expectation produces different affective responses.
- This idea is foundational to later work on musical expectation and predictive processing in music cognition.

2) Step-by-step reasoning
- Meyer observes that musical meaning and feeling are shaped by a listener’s anticipations of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic continuations.
- When music follows predicted patterns, listeners experience resolution or satisfaction; when it deviates, listeners feel surprise, tension, or ambiguity.
- Thus, the emotional response is directly tied to the relation between expected events and actual events in the music.

3) Intermediate (conceptual) steps
- Listeners internalize statistical regularities of a musical style.
- These internal models generate moment-to-moment expectations.
- The comparison between expectation and outcome yields affect: fulfillment → relief/pleasure; postponement → suspense; violation → surprise/anxiety.

4) Why the correct answer is correct
- The statement summarizes Meyer’s thesis succinctly: “emotion in music is all about what we expect, and whether or not we get it.” That paraphrase captures the causal role of expectation in his theory.

5) Why the other option is incorrect
- Marking “False” would deny Meyer’s documented position. There is substantial textual and scholarly evidence that his theory centers on expectation, so “False” contradicts the source.

Conclusion: The correct answer is True, which matches the provided answer.

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