Because of its temporal nature, music presents a unique challenge to the
perceptual systems. To understand music one must infer underlying
musical structure based on a musical surface that is constantly
changing. Accordingly, a central component of musical behavior involves
the abstraction of underlying musical structure from the musical
surface. The following paper discusses the central importance of such
abstraction, looking at examples of the role of abstraction based on a
variety of underlying representational structures (tonal hierarchies,
tonal-metric hierarchies, melodic patterns). These examples support the
idea that musical understanding is fundamentally driven by the
apprehension of structural patterns, and not by auditory surface
information.
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Untitled Document
*Mark A. Schmuckler, Ph.D**
*Acting Vice-Provost, Academic Programs and Innovations in Undergraduate
Education, University of Toronto
Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Toronto Scarborough
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