ABSTRACT
Music as cognition has a unique characteristic. As an artistic composition of sound, music cognition’s first step is auditory perception. However, music cognition is not simply perception of single tones; it includes perception of melody, rhythm and harmony at the same time. Unlike speech and discourse cognition, music cognition does not presuppose the evocation of a fixed meaning for each tone or melody. Furthermore, in the hierarchical structure of music, its cognition remains not only at the step of the processing of melody, rhythm, or harmony, but it proceeds further to the comprehension of structure of music through the cognition of theme and its development, and the character of the composition as a whole (Umemoto, 1990).
