During music listening, humans routinely acquire the regularities of the acoustic sequences and use them to anticipate and interpret the ongoing melody. Specifically, in line with this predictive framework, it is thought that brain responses during such listening reflect a comparison between the bottom-up sensory responses and top-down prediction signals generated by an internal model that embodies the music exposure and expectations of the listener. To attain a clear view of these predictive responses, previous work has eliminated the sensory inputs by inserting “artificial” silences (or sound omissions) that leave behind only the corresponding predictions of the thwarted expectations. Here we demonstrate a new alternate approach in which we decode the predictive EEG responses to the silent intervals that are naturally interspersed within the music. We did this as participants (experiment 1: twenty participants, ten female; experiment 2: twenty-one participants, 6 female) both listened or imagined Bach pi...