Cognitive modeling of human music information processing

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To perceive a sequence of tones as a "melody, " two perceptual processes are essential ; a process for evaluating the metrical organization and a process for evaluating the tonal organization of the sequence. The former assigns a coherent temporal structure on the tone sequence and, as a result, such psychological time units as "beat" and "meter" are perceived. Similarly, processing dedicated to the tonal organization assigns coherence to the relationship between the pitches of the individual notes in the sequence thus conferring a sense of "tonality" upon the sequence. The perceptual processes devoted to the metrical and tonal relationships are considered to comprise independent modules. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the outputs of the two processing modules are integrated, in some way, at some stage of processing. The present study aimed at clarifying the inter-relationship between the two kinds of perceptual processing, i.e., the metrical organization and the tonal organization. We engaged in cognitive modeling of processes involved in the tonal organization and the metrical organization, assuming that they are independent modules. We constructed computer models that were capable of predicting the assignment of "key" of a given tone sequence and the degree of the "keyness, " using only pitches of the constituent notes as data. Our model was found to predict approximately 80% of listeners' key interpretations in a comparison between the results of our simulation study and the recorded responses from the subjects of our experiment. This result is superior to the fits obtained by our implementing programs of any other existing models. We also constructed a computer model that was capable of interpreting the beat and meter of a given tone sequence using only tone-lengths of the constituent notes.