Mind, Body, World- Foundations of Cognitive Science, 2013a

accuracy (i.e., corresponding to a degree of 86 percent or better with Temperley’s
metric intuitions).
One further difference between Temperley’s (2001) algorithmic emphasis and
Lerdahl and Jackendoff’s (1983) emphasis on competence is reflected in how the
theory is refined. Because Temperley’s model is realized as a working computer
model, he could easily examine its performance on a variety of input pieces and
therefore identify its potential weaknesses. He took advantage of this ability to propose
an additional set of four preference rules for metre, as an example, to extend
the applicability of his algorithm to a broader range of input materials.
To this point, the brief examples provided in this section have been used to
illustrate two of the key assumptions made by classical researchers of musical cognition.
First, mental representations are used to impose an organization on music
that is not physically present in musical stimuli. Second, these representations are
classical in nature: they involve different kinds of rules (e.g., preference rules, wellformedness
rules) that can be applied to symbolic media that have musical contents
(e.g., spatial maps, musical scores, piano-roll representations). A third characteristic
also is frequently present in classical theories of musical cognition: the notion
that the musical knowledge reflected in these representations is acquired, or can be
modified, by experience.
The plasticity of musical knowledge is neither a new idea nor a concept that is
exclusively classical. We saw earlier that composers wished to inform their audience
about compositional conventions so the latter could better appreciate performances
(Copland, 1939). More modern examples of this approach argue that ear training,
specialized to deal with some of the complexities of modern music to be introduced
later in this chapter, can help to bridge the gaps between composers, performers,
and audiences (Friedmann, 1990). Individual differences in musical ability were
thought to be a combination of innate and learned information long before the
cognitive revolution occurred (Seashore, 1967): “The ear, like the eye, is an instrument,
and mental development in music consists in the acquisition of skills and the
enrichment of experience through this channel” (p. 3).
The classical approach views the acquisition of musical skills in terms of
changes in mental representations. “We learn the structures that we use to represent
music” (Sloboda, 1985, p. 6). Krumhansl (1990, p. 286) noted that the robust
hierarchies of tonal stability revealed in her research reflect stylistic regularities
in Western tonal music. From this she suggests that “it seems probable, then, that
abstract tonal and harmonic relations are learned through internalizing distributional
properties characteristic of the style.” This view is analogous to those classical
theories of perception that propose that the structure of internal representations
imposes constraints on visual transformations that mirror the constraints imposed
by the physics of the external world (Shepard, 1984b).
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