ABSTRACT
The fact that principles of musical organization seem to be consistent across cultures might lead listener to conclude that music typically contains a number of inherent elements that allow for a listener to more readily perceive and organize it. Methods of musical analysis that are informed by methods from linguistics, such as in F. Lerdahl and R. Jackendoff, provide a framework for the analysis of harmonic progressions that analyzes harmonic structure, as well as the analysis of harmonic tension. Much of the research on the perception of melodies within a tonal framework revolves around a listener's expectations while hearing music. Tonality provides listeners with a way of parsing the musical environments they encounter, using processes derived from physiological, linguistic, cognitive, and cultural constraints and facilitating a perception of centricity, hierarchy, and goal-directedness. To hear a hierarchy of pitches within a key is to hear that some pitches are more important in, central to or prototypical of that key than others.
