Context is everything. It helps us predict what may happen next and what the people around us may do or say. Music can add to this context. In films, music allows us to anticipate what’s coming and drives emotional experiences, such as building suspense or creating a heartwarming moment.
“Music in general, especially when we’re listening attentively, seems to help modulate our emotions,” said Riesa Cassano-Coleman, a graduate student in Elise Piazza’s lab at the University of Rochester, in an interview with the Observer. “During a film, if you hear scary music, it makes it scary. If you take away the music, you’re like, ‘Oh, that’s not that bad.’”
A concert can give you chills or bring you to tears. Heavy metal playing in the background might lead you to talk to someone differently than classical music. An upbeat song might get you excited to pedal faster, lift more, run longer.
Within the music itself, the tonal context—a framework that ranks a certain pitch and chord as central—helps guide predictions about which pitch or chord is likely to follow. This process of forming and evaluating predictions is thought to be the basis for musical emotion.
“Tonal context is just kind of how the music makes sense,” said Cassano-Coleman. “If you’re in the key of C, then the home note C is the one that makes the most sense within the environment. The different patterns of the different notes and the different rhythms all kind of fit in that environment.”
Previous research has not uncovered whether formal training is needed to pick up on this tonal context or how much context people use to make sense of the music and feel the emotion of it.
For example, if someone is using short context, they might listen to 16 seconds of music but only use the last note to predict the next one. But Cassano-Coleman suspected people use more than that and mentally form a sequence. In other words, if given 16 seconds of music, they would rely on the whole 16-second segment to predict what would come next.
To test this, Cassano-Coleman and colleagues scrambled music from Tchaikovsky’s Album for the Young at different timescales (eight bars of intact music, scrambled every two bars, or scrambled every bar).
When diced up and scrambled, “It kind of sounds weird,” said Cassano-Coleman. “Acoustically, it sounds smooth, it sounds fine, but it just sounds like it doesn’t make sense.”
Cassano-Coleman’s intuition about the sound is informed by her background as a musician. To see whether formal training is needed to pick up on this tonal context, she tested both musicians’ and nonmusicians’ abilities across four different tasks with the scrambled music: remembering chunks of music, predicting the next notes, segmenting music into meaningful parts, and identifying the timescale in which the segment was scrambled. If people used more context while doing the tasks, the shorter segments would be harder.
Indeed, the results, published in a 2025 Psychological Science paper, showed that people were more accurate when given more context.
“They do use that whole segment, the whole 16 seconds,” said Cassano-Coleman. “When we disrupt that, that disrupts the processing.”
Surprisingly, musicians and nonmusicians performed similarly overall. Musicians were better able to identify the degree of scrambling in the fourth task, indicating their explicit knowledge of tonal structures probably helped performance in that task.
“We were thinking that formal training would give musicians an advantage, but really it seems like our everyday walking around, just listening and being exposed to music, is enough for our brains to learn,” said Cassano-Coleman. “In the case of memory, you have that context, that kind of structure that you can go back and say, ‘Oh, I heard this little snippet in there somewhere.’ Or with prediction, it gives you enough context to then predict what’s coming next.”
That prediction helps us know not only what’s coming next in the music, but what emotions to prime for. Major chords are brighter and happier than minor chords, which are darker and more serious. Fast music, with many notes jam-packed into each measure, can create anxiety, while slower music that changes less often can be calming.
“Our brains can use the information in the music that’s in front of us in really cool ways,” Cassano-Coleman continued. “Even when we aren’t specifically trained to play music, we still pick up enough of it just walking around, listening.”
Reference
Cassano-Coleman, R. Y., Izen, S. C., & Piazza, E. A. (2025). Listeners systematically integrate hierarchical tonal context, regardless of musical training. Psychological Science, 37(1), 3–17.