Bregman's Chimerae: Music Perception as Auditory Scene Analysis

Research into the perception and cognition of music listening often contains implicit assumptions about the nature of the underlying mental representations, and about the relationship between "auditory processing" and "music perception". We attempt to highlight and problemitize some of these assumptions and to provide a more cognitively appropriate model for music perception and cognition, based on models from the field of Computational Auditory Scene Analysis. We provide initial evidence for the appropriateness of this model by describing several existing and novel auditory/musical phenomena. Finally, we describe some of the new questions such a model raises, and propose certain experiments which might be used to answer them.