The psychological basis of musical garden path

Abstract

This thesis investigates the garden-path processing in music, which occurs when a highly expected interpretation of a musical event turns out to be unsatisfactory as the music unfolds, and our brains try to recover from such unexpected outcomes by finding an alternative interpretation. The present study first discusses how garden-path processing manifests itself in music in various forms and why it constitutes an integral part of music cognition. Then a five-stage theoretical framework called Misinterpretation-Surprise-Reinterpretation-Disambiguation-Reevaluation (MSRDR) is proposed to better define what should be counted as musical garden-paths. To understand how the brain processes musical garden-paths in a real-time manner and how such processing can be influenced by different types of musical memories such as veridical and schematic memories, several experiments using the electroencephalogram and the eye-tracking technique were conducted. In particular, the study addressed major questions concerning different types of parsing models (serial vs. parallel), reanalysis models (forward vs. selective), and expectation (veridical vs. schematic) in the garden-path processing. The study also takes into account various modalities (i.e., how the musical stimuli are presented) of the musical garden-path processing by discussing not only how we listen but also how we read and perform it. Through the discussions of various aspects of garden-path processing in music, the thesis aims to draw attention to this ubiquitous yet less-explored phenomenon in music, hoping that we can better appreciate music and understand its aesthetic and evolutionary significance in due course.