ABSTRACT
Over the last decade, cognitive science has increasingly come to be seen as offering an appropriate framework within which to explore and to explain issues in musical listening, performance, composition, development and analysis. There are a number of reasons for this. As cognitive science develops, it provides progressively more and more sophisticated and plausible accounts of the phenomena of mental life. Moreover, cognitive science appears to offer frameworks of understanding (or at least modes of enquiry) which appear largely “culturally-neutral”. This is of profound importance given the culturally-diffuse nature of music as it exists now in the West and the fact that most musicological frameworks of understanding can be thought of as highly ethnocentric and culturally-specific. In addition, a number of different dynamics are impelling what might be called the “computerisation” of music, or the embodiment of aspects of music in computer software and in hardware. This drive towards representing elements of music in computational terms is motivated by powerful aesthetic, educational and commercial imperatives.
