Bharucha, J.J., and Todd, P.M. (1989). Modeling the perception of tonal structure with neural nets. Computer Music Journal, 13(4), 44-53.

Abstract

What can we say about the perception of music by the silent majority, the listeners for whom music is written but who can neither create music nor articulate their musical experience? How do they passively acquire their demonstrably sophisticated intuitions about musical patterns typical of their culture? Experiments in the cognitive psychology of music have cast some light on the first question. Recent developments in neural net learning now enable us to explore answers to the second. In this article, we discuss an aspect of the experience of the nonmusician listener, namely, contextual influences on the perception of pitch. We do not pretend to capture the listener's experience in all its glory. We limit our discussion to tonal implications and expectations and to memory for pitch sequences. We first summarize some psychological research, and then explore how neural networks can be employed to model the acquisition of these phenomena through passive exposure.



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