The Perception of Music

The author recently described elsewhere a computer program which would transcribe classical melodies played on an organ console into the equivalent of standard musical notation. This program was the fruit of a prolonged effort to understand how Western musicians succeed in making sense of music, in discerning rhythm and the tonal relation hip between notes. The interest of the problem arise from the fact that no two performance of the same piece of music are ever identical so that the listener has to discriminate between those variation of timing and pitch which are structurally significant and those which are merely expressive. In order to under land the ability of some musician to reproduce the cores of music that they hear it is necessary to develop a formally precise theory of rhythm and tonality – a theory which is couched in terms reminiscent of Chomskyan linguistics. But it is also necessary to consider how the listener builds in his mind a representation of the rhythm and tonality of performed music, and succeed in assigning to each note an appropriate place in the developing structure. In this review the relevant areas of musical theory are reviewed, and where necessary extended; and it is suggested that computational models of the kind described can be of great value as vehicle for the expression of precise ideas about our cognitive and perceptual processes.