Anticipation on the Boundaries of Musical and Pictorial Continua

Anticipation plays an essential role in the perception of the empirical reality (see Albertazzi, this Handbook). Music, because of its purely dynamical nature, is a privileged environment for the study of anticipation processes. In this chapter, we firstly discuss the current viewpoint on anticipation in music perception and the meaning of anticipation structures in general. Then we present a descriptive study of how melodies are experienced inside the psychic present, analyzing a series of musical excerpts alongside selected pictorial analogues. Focusing on the dynamic patterns shared by auditory and visual modalities, we discuss the nature of perceptual continua and their boundaries in the subjective space-time.