Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A fundamental problem in music cognition is the question of how the listener extracts the music's temporal organization. We describe a model, implemented as a computer simulation, that constructs a hierarchical representation of metric structure that conforms to the requirements of Lerdahl & Jackendoff's(1983) generative theory. The model integrates bottom-up processing of score data with top-down processes that generate predictions of temporal structure,and with rules of organization that correspond to musical intuition. Several examples of the program's output are used to illustrate these processes.