ABSTRACT
Based on the history of research into music perception and cognition one could be forgiven for assuming that the cultural character of music has little to do with the perceptual capabilities of individuals. Research into the perception and cognition of music has largely focused on the perception of auditory events such as pitch, grouping, and tonal and rhythmic structures. One of the most influential accounts of music cognition in the last twenty years has been the idea that listeners hear relationships between abstract underlying structures in music, as well as surface relationships, and that a hierarchy of tonal structures is fundamental to the listening experience (e.g., Lerdahl and Jackendoff 1983). The titles of work in this domain, such as Steven Handel’s Listening, belie an almost exclusive focus on musical sound conceived in terms of “raw” parameters.
