ABSTRACT
An important development for music perception and cognition in the last few decades is the flourishing interaction between experimental and music-theoretic approaches to systematic issues. According to Krumhansl (1995), the current psychological literature contains many and varied instances of the exchange urged in the 1950s in the writings of Meyer (1956) and Francès (1958/1988). Empirical studies of tonal relations, for example, have led to quantitative descriptions of listeners’ implicit knowledge of music-theoretic constructs; these descriptions portray the consistency and reliability of the internal representation of traditional tonal-harmonic structures. Moreover, and more recently, proposed theoretical structures for contemporary music have been subjected to experimental test, and the results have informed both analysis of psychological processes and critical evaluation of the theory. A particularly strong test of psychological proposals for music perception and cognition is offered when proposals are evaluated in the context of contemporary music (or composed excerpts with specially controlled properties).
