Music Cognition: Learning, Perception, Expectations

Research in music cognition domain has shown that non musician listeners have implicit knowledge about the Western tonal musical system. This knowledge, acquired by mere exposure to music in everyday life, influences perception of musical structures and allows developing expectations for future incoming events. Musical expectations play a role for musical expressivity and influence event processing: Expected events are processed faster and more accurately than less-expected events and this influence extends to the processing of simultaneously presented visual information. Studying implicit learning of auditory material in the laboratory allows us to further understand this cognitive capacity (i.e., at the origin of tonal acculturation) and its potential application to the learning of new musical systems and new musical expectations. In addition to behavioral studies on cognitive processes in and around music perception, computational models allow simulating learning, representation and perception of music for non musician listeners. 1 Immersion in Music: What Is the Brain Doing? In everyday life, we are immersed almost constantly in a musical environment. The development of mp3-players and music-playing telephones has been further enhancing this immersion. In Western culture, most of this music (e.g., classical music, pop, rock, folk, jazz, lullabies) is based on the Western tonal system, even if new musical styles as well as music of other cultures are increasingly present. Most of music listeners are without explicit musical training or practice on an instrument: how is the nonmusician brain process and understand musical structures? The present chapter will focus on perceivers, not composers or performers (see [1, 2] for reviews on musical performance). Music cognition research has provided evidence that nonmusician listeners have acquired implicit knowledge about the Western tonal musical system, just by mere exposure to musical pieces obeying the rules of this system. The musical knowledge, acquired thanks to the cognitive capacity of implicit learning, influences the perception of musical structures and allows developing expectations for future incoming events. This chapter presents some of the basic regularities of the tonal system and an