Humans May Be Naturally Wired to Understand the Complex Structure of Music
There has long been a debate in music cognition about whether understanding complex musical structures requires formal training or whether everyday listening is enough. Many people assume that concepts like harmony, tonal hierarchy, and musical prediction are only accessible to trained musicians who study theory and practice for years. New research from the University of Rochester, however, challenges that assumption and suggests something far more intriguing: humans may be naturally predisposed to understanding the deeper structure of music, even without any formal musical education.
The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, provides strong evidence that nonmusicians are not passive listeners. Instead, they actively and systematically process higher-order musical structures simply through lifelong exposure to music.
The long-standing question in music cognition
At the center of this research is a fundamental question: do people need musical training to understand the hierarchical tonal structure of music? Hierarchical structure refers to how music is organized across multiple levels, from individual notes to phrases, sections, and entire compositions. These structures include familiar concepts such as tonic and dominant relationships, cadences, and harmonic expectations that give music its sense of direction and resolution.
Traditionally, these ideas are taught explicitly in music theory classes. As a result, researchers have often assumed that trained musicians process music differently and more deeply than nonmusicians. While musicians do show advantages in certain technical and analytical tasks, this new work suggests that the core ability to integrate musical context may not depend on training at all.
A new study from the University of Rochester
The research was led by Elise Piazza, an assistant professor in the Departments of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Neuroscience at the University of Rochester. The study was co-led by Riesa Cassano-Coleman, a PhD candidate in brain and cognitive sciences, along with Sarah Izen, a former postdoctoral researcher in the same field.
The researchers set out to examine how both musicians and nonmusicians process musical context over time. Their goal was not to test technical skills, but to understand how listeners make sense of musical structure when key parts of that structure are disrupted.
Music as a hidden hierarchical system
Music, much like language, is built hierarchically. Individual notes combine into motifs, motifs form phrases, phrases become sections, and sections create a full piece. While listeners may not consciously think about these layers, the brain constantly uses them to make predictions, recognize patterns, and store memories.
Until now, relatively little research had explored how complete novices process these layers compared to expert musicians. This study addresses that gap by using an innovative method that manipulates musical context in a controlled way.
Scrambling music to test context processing
The researchers used a novel experimental approach that involved scrambling music at different timescales. This allowed them to control how much tonal context participants received while listening.
The musical material came from Tchaikovsky’s “Album for the Young,” a collection of piano pieces known for clear tonal organization. These pieces were altered in three main ways:
- 8B condition: eight bars of music were kept intact before scrambling
- 2B condition: music was scrambled every two bars
- 1B condition: music was scrambled every single bar
By manipulating the amount of intact musical context, the researchers could observe how listeners used short-term versus long-term information to understand what they were hearing.
Four experiments, one clear pattern
The study consisted of four separate experiments designed to test different aspects of musical cognition:
- Memory – remembering previously heard musical material
- Prediction – anticipating what musical segment should come next
- Event segmentation – identifying meaningful boundaries in music
- Categorization – grouping musical excerpts based on structure
Across all four experiments, participants were asked to respond to the scrambled music in ways that required them to rely on tonal context.
The most striking result was that nonmusicians consistently performed at levels similar to trained musicians. While musicians had more explicit knowledge of music theory, this did not translate into a major advantage in these tasks.
Prediction without training
In the prediction experiment, participants listened to a scrambled musical sequence and then chose which measure should logically come next. As expected, performance improved when more context was available. Both musicians and nonmusicians were more accurate in the 8B condition than in the 2B or 1B conditions.
Crucially, the rate of improvement was nearly identical across groups. As tonal context increased, both musicians and nonmusicians became better at predicting the next musical event. The amount of formal musical training did not predict overall success.
This suggests that listeners, regardless of training, are integrating musical structure across time in systematic ways.
Unconscious knowledge of music theory
One of the most fascinating implications of the study is that nonmusicians appeared to be using music-theory-like knowledge without realizing it. They responded as if they understood harmonic relationships, cadences, and tonal stability, even though they could not explicitly describe those concepts.
This supports the idea that long-term exposure to music over a lifetime is enough to build internal models of musical structure. Simply listening to music, across cultures and contexts, may train the brain in ways similar to formal instruction.
Where music meets language and neuroscience
The findings align closely with research in the neuroscience of language. In language studies, researchers often scramble words, sentences, or paragraphs to examine how the brain processes context at different scales. These studies have shown that the brain relies on both short-term and long-term context to make predictions and guide behavior.
Music appears to work in a similar way. The brain uses context to anticipate what comes next, whether it is the next chord in a symphony or the next word in a sentence. This predictive ability plays a role in everyday activities such as catching a ball, navigating crowds, or finishing someone’s sentence.
The Rochester study is among the first to apply this framework so directly to music.
Implications for aging and brain health
The researchers note that understanding how the brain processes context across time could have important implications beyond music. Context processing changes across the lifespan and may be affected by aging and cognitive decline.
Studying music, which is both structured and emotionally engaging, may offer new ways to investigate how these processes work and how they break down in neurological conditions.
What this means for musicians and performers
While the study shows that nonmusicians have strong implicit musical abilities, it also raises new questions about expert performance. Highly trained musicians must integrate tonal context while simultaneously managing complex motor actions and memory demands.
Many performers describe holding an entire piece “in their fingers.” Understanding how the brain stores and deploys long-range musical context during performance could reveal new insights into motor learning, memory, and expertise.
A broader view of human musicality
Taken together, the findings support the idea that musical understanding is a fundamental human capacity, not a rare skill reserved for trained experts. Formal training may refine and sharpen this ability, but the foundation appears to be built through exposure, prediction, and experience.
Music, like language, may be something the human brain is naturally prepared to learn.
