Melodic expectation can be considered at the esthesic level,[2] in which case the focus lies on the listener and its response to music.
[1] It can be considered at the neutral level,[2] in which case the focus switches to the actual musical content, such as the "printed notes themselves".
[6] The notion of melodic expectation has prompted the existence of a corpus of studies in which authors often choose to provide their own terminology in place of using the literature's.
Meyer argued that music's evocative power derives from its capacity to generate, suspend, prolongate, or violate these expectations.
On a perceptual level, Meyer draws on Gestalt psychology to explain how listeners build mental representations of auditory phenomena.
According to Narmour, prior knowledge of musical expectation is based too heavily upon percepts, introspection and internalization, which bring insoluble epistemological problems.