Perceiving and learning harmonic structure: some news from MUSACT

Harmonic priming research provides evidence that local and global harmonic contexts influence processing of target chords for musician and nonmusician listeners. Perceptual analysis-of musical structures partly depends on how listeners' knowledge of tonal hierarchies are represented in the mind. Internalized representations of structural regularities generates musical expectations and facilitates the processing of harmonically related events. MUSACT (Bharucha, 1987) provides a connectionist framework for the representation of tonal knowledge. Activation spreading through a network of representational units accounts for the influence of local and- global context on the processing of chords. The listeners' implicit knowledge of harmonic structures is acquired through mere exposure to the conventional relationships between musical events in Western tonal music. MUSACT represents the idealized end-state of such a learning process. In this paper, we present computer simulation^demonstrating that MUSACT's basic structure can be learned by mere exposure via self-organization.

1999