Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The communication of musical thoughts and emotions requires that some musical knowledge is shared by composers, performers, and listeners. Computational models of musical knowledge attempt to specify the intermediate representations required to generate adequate predictions of musical behavior. W e describe a connectionist model that encodes the rhythmic organization and pitch contents of simple melodies. As the network learns to encode melodies, structurally more important events tend to dominate less important events, as described by reductionist theories of music (Lerdahl & JackendofF, 1983; Schenker, 1979). W e describe an empirical study in which improvisations on a tune by a skilled music performer are compared with the encodings produced by the network. The two are examined in terms of the relative importance of the musical structure they posit at intermediate levels of representation.