Music Perception Systems

I propose a dissertation that examines the psychoacoustic bases of the perception of music by human listen-ers. As music is fundamentally an acoustic phenomenon, a theory of music psychology is not a theory of music perception unless it can explain how a listener maps from the acoustic signal to an intermediate structural representation which allows cognition to occur. I propose to build computer models which can mimic basic musical perceptions such as parsing music into sections, tapping along with the beat, classify-ing music by genre and recognizing composers of pieces, upon taking complex acoustic signals as input. The dissertation that results will be both a scientific inquiry into the nature of the music-listening process, and a practical solution to certain difficult problems in computer-based multimedia. My proposed research is supported by three bodies of background literature: psychoacoustics, music psy-chology, and musical signal processing. I review selected topics from these literatures pertinent to my re-search and contextualize my own proposals in light of this previous work. The predominant theoretical stance I propose is one in which the reliance of music-analysis systems on “notes ” is set aside in favor of a more directly acoustic and perceptual model of the listening process. In particular, I wish to focus on acoustic signal-processing techniques that can model the perceptual formation of fused musical objects i