Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.