Good article and actually having audio to illustrate the things the author talks about is helpful. For people interested in diving into this concept more deeply

Good article and actually having audio to illustrate the things the author talks about is helpful. For people interested in diving into this concept more deeply, there's a whole theoretical/analytical approach around musical expectation that was developed back in the 90s by Eugene Narmour: The Implication-Realization model (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implication-Realization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implication-Realization). Interestingly enough, it looks like the predictive power of the model holds up pretty well when tested in the real world: http://www.erin.utoronto.ca/~w3psygs/SchellenbergCognition.pdf http://www.erin.utoronto.ca/~w3psygs/SchellenbergCognition.p... I've been out of the music theory game for a while, so I don't know if anyone's doing much with the I-R model anymore, but it's a fascinating approach to music analysis.