Cognitive Foundations of Musical Pi

Cognitive Foundations of Musical Pitch considers the problem of how listeners encode, organize, and remember pitch patterns in music. The work seeks to explicate the nature of listeners' knowledge of how pitch structures are formed, identify musical properties that shape this knowledge, and characterize the process through which sequences of sounds become coherent, memorable, and meaningful. The approach taken is that of cognitive psychology, in which laboratory methods examine the nature of mental representations and processes. Previous publications have described a number of the studies. They are summarized here together with new results, allowing richer connections to be drawn between the empirical findings. Theoretical and methodological issues surrounding the laboratory studies are also examined. The experiments focus primarily on pitch structures in traditional Western music. This choice of focus is based on the large corpus of literature in music theory that deals with this style. This literature has been important for designing the experimental materials and interpreting the results. A number of studies extend the methods to music outside this tradition. Throughout, care has been taken to provide adequate background in experimental methods and music theory so that no special background is needed to follow the major arguments. However, the reader will naturally discover certain topics to be of greater interest than others depending on his or her special expertise.