The listener's experience of a part

The listener's experience of a particular musical sequence is driven and constrained by the sounds registered by auditory mechanisms and processed by available mental resources. Furthermore, the construction of the music itself must respect the listener's capacities for appreciating structured auditory information. That is, the way musical materials are formed must take into consideration certain inherent limitations and special capabilities of the listener. It is possible, for instance, that particular pitch combinations predominate in music because they are perceived as consonant or pleasing, and this may be a consequence of peripheral auditory mechanisms for registering pitch. Simple ratios of durations, such as 2 : 1 and 3:1 , may be more readily perceived and more accurately remembered, and thus more commonly employed in the formation of metrical and rhythmic units. Or, to take another example, the duration of rhythmic and pitch patterns may reflect limitations in memory capacity. All this suggests that music psychology must seek to understand the interdependencies between the structured sound material of the music and the listener's capacity for apprehending and remembering relations among the sounded events