Final-note expectancy and humor: an empirical investigation

Melodic expectations were manipulated to investigate the nature of tonally incongruent melodic final notes that may elicit humor in listeners. To our knowledge, this is the first experiment aiming at studying humor elicitation in music with the use of empirical, quantitative methods. To this aim, we have based the experiment on the incongruency/resolution theory of humor and the violations of expectations in music. Our goal was to determine the amount of change, that is, the degree of incongruency required to elicit humor.

We composed two simple, 8-bar long melodies, and changed their final notes so that they could randomly finish on any semitone between an octave upwards and downwards with respect to the original, tonic final note. This resulted in 25 versions for both melodies, including the original final notes, for each semitone. Musician and non-musician participants rated each version of each melody on five 7-point bipolar scales according to goodness of fit, humor, beauty, playfulness, and pleasantness.

Our results showed that even a single change of the final note can elicit humor. No strong connection was found between humor elicitation and the level of incongruency (i.e., the amount of violation of expectation). Instead, changes to the major-mode melody were more likely to be found humorous than those to the minor-mode melody, implying that a so-called playful context is necessary for humor elicitation as the major melody was labelled playful by the listeners. Furthermore, final notes below the original tonic end note were also found to be less humorous and less fitting to the melodic context than those above it.