Leman M. Music and Schema Theory. Cognitive Foundations of Systematic Musicology

Springer, 1995. — 240 p.In 1987, when I started to set up the research facilities at the Institute for Psychoacoustics and Electronic Music (IPEM) of the University of Ghent, Belgium, music cognition was still dominated by a symbol-based paradigminspired by computational linguistics. Music was conceived of as a set of symbols (like the notes on a score) on which rules were operating. Being aware of the limitations of this approach, the projects at IPEM have attempted to give music cognition a foundation in sound, rather than scores. New developments in psychoacoustics and, above all, the new and radical methods of the subsymbolic paradigm have been a source of inspiration on which the present approach has been based. This monograph summarizes the results of my research over the years and explores new paths for future work. The aim is to give musicologists, students, researchers and interested laypersons a profound introduction to some fundamental issues in the cognitive foundations of systematic musicology. This is done by means of a case study in tone center perception but the results are extrapolated towards other modalities of music cognition, such as rhythm and timbre perception.
An interdisciplinary viewpoint had to be adopted which includes results of musicology, psychology, computer science, brain science, and philosophy. In order to make all this accessible to a general audience, care has been taken to make the text as self-contained as possible. The technical language has been restricted to the most elementary concepts.Tone Semantics
Pitch as an Emerging Percept
Defining the Framework
Auditory Models of Pitch Perception
Schema and Learning
Learning Images-out-of-Time
Learning Images-in-Time
Schema and Control
Evaluation of the Tone Center Recognition Model
Rhythm and Timbre Imagery
Epistemological Foundations
Cognitive Foundations of Systematic Musicology
A: Orchestra Score in CSOUND.
B: Physiological Foundations of the Auditory Periphery
C: Normalization and Similarity Measures