Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

GTSIM, a computer simulation of Lerdahl and Jackendoff's (1983) A Generative Theory of Tonal Music, is a model of human cognition of musical rhythm. GTSIM performs left-to-right, single-pass processing on a symbolic representation of information taken from musical scores. A rule-based component analyzes the grouping structure, which is the division of a piece of music into units like phrases and the combination of these phrases into motives, themes, and the like. The resulting analysis often diverges from the analysis we would produce using our musical intuition; we explore some of the reasons for this. In particular, GTSIM needs to have an algorithm for determining parallel structures in music. We consider alphabet encoding (Deutsch and Feroe, 1981) and discrimination nets (Feigenbaum and Simon, 1984) as algorithms for parallelism.