Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Cognitive representations of musical structure have long been of interest to psychologists and musicians. This project addresses comprehension of and long-term memory for musical form, a debated topic in music cognition. We use three methods: a corpus of Billboard magazine’s top 10 songs for each of the last 20 years; a probabilistic grammar derived from this corpus; and an experiment testing predictions of the grammar. Two statistical analyses of the corpus are presented here, dealing with its zero- and first-order Markov properties. These provide a probablistic grammar of form in popular songs. We have tested this grammar by prompted recall of listeners’ memory for popular songs they claim to know well. Recalls average over 70% correct; errors in these recalls most often correspond to low-frequency 2-tuples in our networks. Our results show that listeners learn statistical regularities of form in popular music, much as they learn melodic and harmonic structure.