Past cognitive studies have found that listeners can recognize familiar tunes quickly (Bailes 2010; Krumhansl 2010), but little attention has been given to how tune recognition occurs outside of the lab. The sounds of familiar and favorite tunes in the wild often evoke excitement. For instance, many audiences at jazz performances in the late twentieth century applauded when they realized a well-known standard was being performed. This applause upon recognition acted both as a display of excitement and as a marker of genre expertise, but the process of tune recognition for jazz standards is problematized by the interpretative variability across performances and the murky ontological identity of jazz standards (Kane 2024; Smither 2024). In this paper, I discuss the phenomenon of audience applause for tune recognition and analyze applause in live jazz recordings to hypothesize jazz enthusiasts’ cognitive processes for memory and recognition.

I draw on theorizations of the performer-audience relationship in jazz (Berliner 1994; Monson 1996; Ashe 1999; Burland and Pitts 2012; Coppola 2021) and scientific studies on the nature of audience applause (Mann et al. 2013) to develop a methodology for analyzing applause-as-recognition at jazz performances. I show that aspects of the performers, venue, audience, and tune impact both recognition and the willingness of the audience to applaud. Thus, I argue that tracking the onset of audience applause-as-recognition identifies the outgoing audience members with the fastest recognition.

I use this methodology to run comparative analyses of applause-as-recognition in live jazz recordings from the late twentieth century. Through these analyses, I observe that the degree to which a performance deviates from the standard practices of the tune forms a reciprocal relationship with the speed of tune recognition. This suggests that audiences are primed for quicker recognition when the performance aligns with the typical conception of the tune, so I argue that studying tune recognition can help discern the makeup of jazz enthusiasts’ referents (Pressing 1984).

In recent cognitive scholarship, expectation-based learning has become a central framework for explaining musical pleasure. Across methodologies—including information-theoretic models (Huron 2006; Meyer 1957; Temperley 2014, 2019), research on familiarity and liking (Berlyne 1960, 1971; Madison & Schiölde 2017), neuroscientific experiments (Cheung 2019; Gold 2019ab; Mas-Herero 2025), and studies of repetition (Deutsch 2019; Margulis 2014)—scholarship frequently converges on “Goldilocks zones” (Osborn 2017) of optimal complexity wherein enjoyment arises from a perceived balance between novelty and predictability. Yet few accounts consider how twenty-first-century media reshape listeners’ negotiations of that balance or transform the very conditions under which musical expectations are formed and revised. I argue that recording and playback technologies do not merely complement cognitive scholarship but strongly influence broader aesthetic practices.

Building on Friedrich Kittler (1986), I suggest that technologies capable of capturing raw sound—from the gramophone onward—reshape listening strategies by expanding available sonic materials. Richard Beaudoin’s (2024) work on “sounds as they are” in classical recordings highlights these perceptually salient but un-notated elements including breaths and mechanical artifacts. I argue that, as replayability and repetition heighten predictability, these subtler artifacts rise to the attentional fore as listeners seek new novelties to balance familiarity. Drawing on Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s (1990) theory of flow, I theorize “autotelic listening” as a self-directed recalibration of attention that restores experiential balance. In highly predictable contexts, listeners cultivate new sources of challenge by foregrounding incidental or material sounds.

As these autotelic listening strategies abound, compositional strategies accordingly react, creating a feedback loop between perception and production: as listeners privilege such sounds, composers increasingly incorporate and amplify them as primary parameters. Analyses of Colin Stetson All This I Do For Glory (2017), William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops (2001), and Eric Wubbels’s This is this is this is (2010) trace distinct manifestations of this loop, from the focalization of performative effort (Cole 2023) to media deterioration as teleology (Cascone 2000) and the ethical valorization of selective attention (Wallace 2005). Together, these cases position autotelic listening as a bridge between cognitive theory, media history, and contemporary compositional aesthetics.

Musical repetition is foundational to how listeners organize attention, form expectations, and construct meaning (Margulis, 2013; Lewin, 1986; Hatten, 2018). In short-form media environments, however, repetition is both an aesthetic feature and a foundational condition of digital infrastructures. Platforms such as TikTok and Instagram Reels algorithmically privilege brief, looping excerpts that circulate across thousands of videos. These environments intensify repetition’s dual role as both a local compositional device and a large-scale experiential framework. So, how does repetition in short-form media affect how users experience, navigate, and remember musical material?

To investigate how these patterns of intensified repetition affect audiovisual experience, this paper presents findings from two behavioral experiments demonstrating systematic effects of musical looping on immersion and viewing behavior. Both experiments mimicked short-form viewing contexts by presenting participants with brief video clips (25–53 seconds) paired with musical tracks that differed in looping frequency: highly repetitive excerpts repeated every four seconds, while less repetitive excerpts looped every eight or sixteen seconds. In Experiment 1, participants alternated between viewing clips and reporting engagement using an established immersion scale (Lessiter et al., 2001). In Experiment 2, participants navigated a continuous feed of videos, with viewing duration serving as a behavioral proxy for engagement (Janata et al., 2018).

Results reveal a striking divergence. Highly repetitive music increased reported immersion in Experiment 1 but produced shorter viewing durations in Experiment 2. Together, these findings demonstrate that repetition’s experiential consequences are context-dependent: the same structural feature can deepen subjective immersion while simultaneously altering behavioral engagement.

These results extend music-theoretical discussions of repetition beyond score-based structure to include platform-conditioned listening practices. Understanding repetition in this context requires treating musical structure and media environment as mutually shaping forces. For music theory and analysis, this shift highlights how digital infrastructures transform the experiential impact of familiar musical devices. In short-form media, repetition becomes a mechanism through which platforms organize perception, guide engagement, and potentially absorb listeners into continuous streams of content. These dynamics open new analytical opportunities for theorizing how musical features operate within contemporary audiovisual ecosystems.