This study is a tentative essay of formalization of the concept of Musical Relevance. Even if it is conceived in the framework of computationalism, until now Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory has no implementation. Moreover it has never been applied to the case of musical thinking. Our claim is that the application of the concept of Cognitive Relevance to music would permit to partially exp...

We examined absolute-pitch (AP) and short-term musical memory abilities of five musical savants with congenital blindness, seven musicians, and seven non-musicians with good vision and normal intelligence in two experiments. In the first, short-term memory for musical phrases was tested and the savants and musicians performed statistically indistinguishably, both significantly outperforming the...

An approach of evolving form in musical composition is presented here. The use of genetic algorithms in musical composition is not new but rather energetically active field of research and experiments. However, the approach presented within this paper differs from other genetic composition approaches in twofold. First, samples of musical ideas (one note or more) and not individual MIDI notes ar...

This study is concerned with the question whether, and to what extent, listeners' previous exposure to music in everyday life, and expertise as a result of formal musical training, play a role in making expressive timing judgments in music. This was investigated by using a Web-based listening experiment in which listeners with a wide range of musical backgrounds were asked to compare 2 recordin...

A 73-year-old woman outpatient with mild cognitive impairment, parasomnia and depressive state with musical hallucinations failed to respond to 400 mg/day of valproate. Once she was admitted to a university hospital, her musical hallucinations partially responded to 1 mg/day of clonazepam and sufficiently improved on 100 mg/day of carbamazepine. Two months after discharge, however, her musical ...

Using short and long contexts, the present study investigated musical priming effects that are based on chord repetition and harmonic relatedness. A musical target (a chord) was preceded by either an identical prime or a different but harmonically related prime. In contrast to words, pictures, and environmental sounds, chord processing was not facilitated by repetition. Experiments 1 and 2 usin...