Abstract: The article reviewed the latest progress in the field of musical perceptual expectation from five main aspects: the origin of musical perceptual expectation; the four ratings of music events that musical perceptual expectation depend; the two classify and five study methods to musical perceptual expectation; the main fields that musical perceptual expectation research in, such as ERP(Event-Related Potential of Musical Expectancy), attention, memory, and priming effect. The music expectancy affect the time of music performance because of different musical event perception and different music time estimation. At last, the article concerned about the direction for future research, and pointed out the importance to study the function and characteristic of expectancy in music performance and its time deviation

Key words: music, perceptional expectation, music performance, priming effect