Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A basic problem in music perception is how a listener develops a hierarchical representation of the metric structure of music of the sort proposed in the generative theory of Lerdahl & Jackendoff (1983).'This paper describes work on a constraint satisfaction approach to the perception of the metric structure of music in which many independent "agents" respond to particular events in the music, and where a representation of the metric structure emerges as a result of distributed local interactions between the agents. This approach has been implemented in two P D P simulation models that instantiate the constraints in different ways. The goal of this work is to develop psychologically and physiologically plausible models of meter perception.