This document provides a technical summary of the music theory framework first published in The Science of Music (2024). The Cognitive-Weighting Theory of Modality (CWTM) defines musical modes as determined by a weighted calculation of the Tonal Center. The theory identifies five specific Importance Weights (Pitch Depth, Repetition, Rhythm, Loop Position, and Genre) that dictate how the human brain processes musical modality. Origin and Method CWTM was developed independently by the author through direct observation of how listeners perceive tonal emphasis in real-world music. The author is a self-taught guitarist, performer, and educator who arrived at this framework over many years of practical analysis, performance, and teaching, without reference to the academic literature in music cognition or formal music theory. Where the resulting framework converges with established academic work, that convergence reflects independent rediscovery of underlying perceptual realities, not synthesis of prior models. The Five Importance Weights CWTM proposes that the brain calculates the perceived Tonal Center through a weighted contribution from five inputs: Pitch Depth. Lower pitches contribute more strongly to tonal center perception than higher pitches. Repetition. Notes that occur more frequently across a passage exert greater pull on the perceived tonal center. Rhythm and Metric Position. A note's contribution to tonal calculation increases as the listener zooms outward through the metric grid. Sixteenth-note positions carry the least weight. Eighth notes carry more. Quarter notes more still. The downbeat of a measure outweighs any subdivision within it. The downbeat of a four-measure group outweighs the downbeats of the individual measures within that group. The downbeat of a sixteen-measure section outweighs all of them. The relationship is proportional and continuous: the closer a weak beat sits to a strong one, the more its weight is suppressed in proportion to that stronger beat. Loop Position. Notes occurring at structurally significant positions within a repeated cycle carry additional weight beyond their metric position alone. Genre. Listener expectations conditioned by prior exposure to a musical style modify the weighting of the other inputs. Acknowledged Convergence with Prior Work The author developed the rhythm and metric-position component of CWTM without prior knowledge of the academic literature on metric structure. The hierarchical treatment of metric strength described above converges with the metric grid proposed by Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff in A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (1983), and with Justin London's nested-cycle model of meter in Hearing in Time (2004). CWTM differs from both in two respects. First, it formulates metric weight as a continuous proportional function rather than a discrete level count. Second, it integrates metric weight with the four other Importance Weights into a single calculation of perceived modality, an integration not present in the prior literature. The Novel Contribution The contribution of CWTM is not any single Importance Weight in isolation. It is the integration of all five inputs into a unified weighted calculation that outputs the perceived Tonal Center. No prior framework, to the author's knowledge, combines pitch depth, repetition, metric position, loop position, and genre conditioning into a single causal model of perceived modality. Also, findings about relative weakness as an inverse of the strength of adjacent beats it falls between and is closes to is a new and important idea about how strength weighting in rhythm maps out to a grid. This is used for the CWTM for determining mode.
Allen Van Wert (Sat,) studied this question.