Reddit reviews Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation (A Bradford Book)

If you are studying this, I recommend "Sweet Anticipation".

Its an emotional and physiological response where your body "freezes" during novel or passive threat (like falling off a cliff).

With so much lip service towards fight or flight response in music we tend to forget that doing nothing might be the best response.

Additionally, the text also talks about comedy in music. Interestingly, comedy is entirely cultural and hard to accomplish in music.

/r/musiccognition welcomes you, friend. Also I'd suggest this book on music emotions topic David Huron - Sweet Anticipation. Music and the Psychology of Expectation.

> I'd like to see some scientific evidence on the pleasure of music being connected with meeting our expectations

David Huron's book Sweet Anticipation is a great book on this exact topic.

Edit: didn't see someone already posted this. There are other good sources in the bibliography of my diss (p. 111) http://www.nathanwilks.com/dissertation.html

Well anything that falls under "cross-cultural" usually winds up with the ethnomusicologists.

You sound like you'd be more interested in the music cognition side of music theory (not my area at all). Again, Music Perception is going to be your best bet here. You might also check out David Huron's book, Sweet Anticipation, which deals with anticipation in music from a psychological perspective. Juslin and Sloboda's Handbook of Music and Emotion has a lot of the cognitive side of things as well, if you're interested in that aspect. Finally, David Temperley's Cognition of Basic Musical Structures or Justin London's Hearing in Time might be worth a look.

http://www.amazon.com/Sweet-Anticipation-Psychology-Expectation-Bradford/dp/0262582783/