 Expectations are mental states that are about how the musical piece will unfold. So they are future-directed mental states. But this leaves open just what kind of mental states they are – how they are structured, how they represent this upcoming future event and so on (see Judge and Nanay 2021 for an overview of the options and the history of this question). At least some forms of expectations in fact count as mental imagery. And musical expectations (of the kind involved in examples like the Ta-Ta-Ta-Taaaam) count as auditory temporal mental imagery: they are auditory representations that result from perceptual processes that are not directly triggered by the auditory input. The listener forms mental imagery of the fourth note (‘Taaam’) on the basis of the experience of the first three (‘Ta-Ta-Ta’) (there is a lot of empirical evidence that this is in fact what happens – see Yokosawa et al. 2013, Kraemer et al. 2005, Zatorre and Halpern 2005, Herholz et al. 2012, Leaver et al. 2009). This mental imagery may or may not be conscious. But if the actual ‘Taaaam’ diverges from the way our mental imagery represents it (if it is delayed, or altered in pitch or timbre for example), we notice this divergence and experience as salient as a result of the mismatch between the experience and the mental imagery that preceded it.