Towards a Cognitive Architecture for Music Perception

The framework of a cognitive architecture for music perception is presented. The architecture extends and completes a similar architecture for computer vision developed during the years. The extended architecture takes into account many relationships between vision and music perception. The focus of the architecture resides in the intermediate area between the subsymbolic and the linguistic areas, based on conceptual spaces. A conceptual space for the perception of notes and chords is discussed along with its generalization for the perception of music phrases. A focus of attention mechanism scanning the conceptual space is also outlined. The focus of attention is driven by suitable linguistic and associative expectations on notes, chords and music phrases. Some problems and future works of the proposed approach are also outlined.