Information-Processing Paradigm

Information-Processing Approaches and Musical Research

Although rarely expressed in explicit forms such as computer programs or mathematical models, theories of music perception and music cognition have often drawn upon, or reflect, information-processing frameworks. Almost all such theories involve the transformation of sensory inputs into other, more abstract or higher-order representations, and frequently also invoke some kinds of knowledge structures stored in long-term memory. Consider, for example, the way in which musical pitch is understood.

One influential theory represents musical pitches as cognitive entities that have been abstracted away from certain of their surface features (exact frequency, spectral content, octave placement, amplitude envelope, and the like). These pitches are then interpreted via overlearned schemata based on the hierarchic structures of musical keys or scales, where some pitches are more central or important than others (the tonic and dominant, the first and fifth notes of the conventional major scale), and are close together in a cognitive space modeled as a low-dimensional geometric space, with other pitches being more distal. These geometric spaces can be planar (two-dimensional) or of higher dimensionalities (including conic, spiral, and torodial projections). Thus, this theory of cognitive pitch relationships clearly relies upon information-processing theories in its distinction between sensory (surface) and long-term (schematic) representations of pitch, with the contextual interpretation of pitches according to a local, often changing, major or minor falling somewhere in the middle (like short-term memory).

Other well-known approaches to music perception also make use of short-term versus long-term distinctions; this has been the case since early in the development of music cognition. One such is W. J. Dowling's classic 1978 study of melodic processing in short-term memory, where melodies are represented as a contour (pattern of “up” and “down” movements of notes) quantized by the overlearned schema of the diatonic scale. The melodies in memory were abstracted away from their veridical sensory presentation (they were transposed—shifted up or down from their original pitch level and key), and made use of both short-term ad hoc structures (the melodic contours) and cognitive representations held in long-term memory (scale structures). From music-theoretic, rather than experimental, perspectives, theories of musical pitch structures ranging from the schema-based approaches of Leonard Meyer (in 1973) and his students to generative theories such as those of F. Lerdahl and R. Jackendoff (in 1983) to theories of atonal music such as that of A. Forte (in 1977) require some kind of abstraction away from the musical surface, and thus implicate cognitive processing of an information-processing variety.

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