Music is a central human trait across all cultures and historical periods, and it involves a rich variety of parameters, ways of structure building and related cognitive processes. Exploring the potential of syntactic structures in music and their cognition, this research project aimed at advancing our understanding of human cognition and, specifically, the capacity to represent and process complex auditory sequences and syntactic structures. The project is further highly relevant for understanding how different kinds of structures are employed in music, which may inform a large audience of musicologists, composers, practicing musicians as well as interested members of the general society. Advancing from the PI’s previous work, this interdisciplinary research program has been divided into three core strands:
(A) The theoretical strand is devoted to the investigation of formal principles that govern musical syntax and structure building in Western and non-Western music. The central goal of the theoretical part was to develop a novel unified theory of musical syntax that reconciles harmonic structure with dependencies at the level of the single note and voice leading within a single coherent framework and to extend these ways of modeling to other musical parameters.
(B) Addressing the lack of machine-readable corpora in music research, the second part of the project set out to compile a corpus of digitized syntactic analyses. Further, the second central aim of the computational part was to develop grammar models to process and parse musical structures based on the theories developed as well as to build different models for heuristics of hierarchical structure in music.
(C) The formal framework developed in (A) entails specific predictions about mental representations of musical structure and cognitive processes, which have been empirically explored in the experimental strand of the project. Particular focus has been be on aspects of musical processing, nonlocal dependency relations, revision, and perceived musical tension.
The outcomes of the project will make a significant contribution to both the field of music cognition and to the cognitive sciences in general. The project helps to understand the central questions of how and why music works the way it does.
