Recent music cognition studies (Steinbeis, Koelsch, and Sloboda, 2006; Janata, 1995; etc.) have investigated how participants respond to major violations in harmonic expectancy, yet few have examined more subtle violations. This study tests whether musicians can detect subtle violations in the form of inverted chords. Linguistic studies of semantic and syntactic violations have revealed a potential overlap between the fields of music and language, and this study is created as a distant musical version of the cloze probability method task. 30 musicians rated how well different chords completed a two-measure harmonic progression following a short pause. Each chord that ended the progression consisted of either the expected chord content with the unexpected bass note (root position, first inversion, or second inversion), or the expected bass note with unexpected chord content. The chords with unexpected content served as a control in this study, ensuring that participants were able to recognize major harmonic expectancy violations. Progressions were created using standard chorale voice-leading practice, and were sounded on a synthesized MIDI piano patch. Additionally, each progression was highly constrained, creating a high expectancy for a particular chord to complete a cadence or familiar chord sequence. Participant responses between inversion types were compared, as well as responses between inverted chords and the “incorrect” chords. An analysis of average participant rating in each condition revealed that musicians are able to detect subtle violations in harmonic progressions. Future neurological studies utilizing electroencephalography, such as an ERP study, may yield more specific results in the way that subtle harmonic expectancy violations compare to semantic and syntactic violations in linguistics.