Newell (1990) argued that the time is ripe for unified theories of cognition that encompass the full scope of cognitive phenomena. Newell and his colleagues (Newell, 1990; Laird, NeweU & Rosenbloom, 1987) have proposed Soar as a candidate theory. W e are exploring the application of Soar to the domain of music cognition. MusicSoar is a theory of the cognitive processes in music perception. A n important feature of MusicSoar is that it attempts to satisfy the real-time constraints of music perception within the Soar framework. If MusicSoar is a plausible model of music cognition, then it indicates that much of a listener's ability is based on a kind of memory-based reasoning involving pattern recognition and fast retrieval of information from memory: Soar's problem-solving methods of creating subgoals are too slow for routine perception, but they are involved in creating the knowledge in long-term memory that then can meet the processing demands of music in real time.