You might be amused to know that David Huron (see my comment below) has done something similar to what you’re talking about: he analyzed (PDF) the timing of audiences’ laughter responses to music that is supposed to be humorous (a corpus of live performances of pieces by P. D. Q. Bach) in order to figure out the psychological mechanisms at work in musical expectation.
You might be amused to know that David Huron (see my comment below) has done something similar to what you’re talking about: he analyzed (PDF) the timing of audiences’ laughter responses to music that is supposed to be humorous (a corpus of live performances of pieces by P. D. Q. Bach) in order to figure out the psychological mechanisms at work in musical expectation.
Thanks—that’s absolutely fascinating.