Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A primary goal of music cognition is to understand mental representations for musical knowledge that allow communication of thoughts and emotions. Theories of musical competence generally model mental representations in terms of structure given in the musical text, and do not model performers' preferential choices of structural content for emphasis.Such choices are an important component of musical interpretation. Two sources of converging evidence are described that support the role of phrases as structures in mental representations for music performance: evidence from expressive timing in skilled performance and from performance breakdowns (errors). The location and amount of expressive timing,and the likelihoods of different error types coincided with musicians' notated interpretations.Evidence from both ideal and non-ideal musical behavior implicate the same structures in representation of musical knowledge, and suggest that individual preferences can explain much variation in music performance.