Recognition

In music, recognition refers to the identification of some aspect pertaining to music. Recognition might involve identification of previously known songs or melodies by a listener. It might also involve identification of rhythms, musical motifs, genres, or composers. Recognition plays an important role in various aspects of music listening and cognition.

The mental processes used for recognition are the same processes that a listener would use to find similarities and differences across various types of music using preexisting knowledge schemas that they have acquired over several years of experience. Recognition helps a listener make sense of new music by comparing new music against what they have heard before, thus identifying familiar musical patterns and categorizing them accordingly. Recognition also helps a listener in ascertaining the degree of originality in someone's composition. For example, a listener might recognize someone's composition as very similar to another composer's style. This would cause them to judge the composition as less original. Assessing similarity between the source of the music and the target with which it is compared is therefore important for recognition.

Recognition requires different cognitive processes involving perception and memory. For example, in the case of melody recognition, a listener has to first perceive the pitches and pitch intervals, as well as the higher-level harmonic, tonal, and rhythmic structure of the melody. Because a melody evolves in time, previously occurring pitches and intervals need to be stored in short-term memory as context for new information. Once the larger structure of the melody is perceived, it has to be compared against existing melodies in long-term memory. Depending on the extent of match based on similarity, the listener can determine if the current melody is a previously known melody and identify the melody.