Significant questions also arise ab

Significant questions also arise about the kinds of behaviors or responses that are to be measured. Various considerations come into play here as well. The cognitive psychologist is interested in describing an in ternal system that cannot be examined directly. Consequently, its properties must be inferred from external, observable behaviors. For the most part, musical experience is not well suited to verbal description, which may be one reason why music has received less attention than other cognitive activities. Although one component of training in music is the acquisition of terminologies for characterizing musical structure (and these often take a verbal form, although other symbolic devices are also used), not all listeners or even performers have sophisticated skills in music analysis. If one is interested in understanding the musical experience of listeners with diverse levels of training, then the observed responses should not require special knowledge of established descriptive systems. A similar argument applies to responses requiring production, such as music transcription, playing an instrument, or even singing. Nonetheless, the observations made should be musically relevant, that is, they should be matched in some way to the experience itself. The observations made are informative only to the extent that the mode of response mirrors essential components of the internal systems engaged in listening. Here again, a considerable degree of intuition is involved