Music and Schema Theory

Book excerpt: Music is an important domain of application for schema theory. The perceptual structures for pitch and timbre have been mapped via schemata, with results that have contributed to a better understanding of music perception. Yet we still need to know how a schema comes into existence, or how it functions in a particular perception task. This book provides a foundation for the understanding of the emergence and functionality of schemata by means of computer-based simulations of tone center perception. It is about how memory structures self-organize and how they use contextual information to guide perception.