Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Part of what we call "expression" or "espressive meaning" in music m a y be regarded as an emergent property of the interaction of "musical forces" that I call gravity, magnetism, and inertia. These forces are implicit in Gestalt psychological principles of perceptual organization, current theories of tonal music, and recent experimental work in psychoacoustics. A n explicit account of their operation and interaction allows us to predict which patterns of musical motion trained listeners will tend to expect in tonal music. A computer program called What Next models the operation of these forces. Given a string of melodic pitches in a specific tonal context. What next lists predicted continuations. A comparison of these predictions with the results of an experiment (Lake 1987), in which trained listeners were given a string of melodic pitches in a specific tonal context and asked to sing a continuation, suggests that the forces modeled have cognitive significance and explanatory power.