Implicit learning of tonality: a self-organizing approach. Psychol Rev

Tonal music is a highly structured system that is ubiquitous in our cultural environment. We demonstrate the acquisition of implicit knowledge of tonal structure through neural self-organization resulting from mere exposure to simultaneous and sequential combinations of tones. In the process of learning, a network with fundamental neural constraints comes to internalize the essential correlational structure of tonal music. After learning, the network was run through a range of experiments from the literature. The model provides a parsimonious account of a variety of empirical findings dealing with the processing of tone, chord, and key relationships, including relatedness judgments, memory judgments, and expectan-cies. It also illustrates the plausibility of activation being a unifying mechanism underlying a range of cognitive tasks. Natural environments contain highly structured systems to which we are exposed in everyday life. The human brain internal-izes these regularities by passive exposure, and the acquired im-plicit knowledge influences perception and performance. Aspects of language and music provide two examples of highly structured systems that may be learned in an incidental manner. In each case