Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The purpose of this paper is to extend an earlier theory of pleasure associated with harmonic sequences to melodic sequences. The theory stated that the sequences that will be pleasurable will be the ones that allow a coherent transition from one mental state to the next. This can be measured in a connectionist model by noting the strength of the activation boost in a competitive layer categorizing the elements of the sequence. It is suggested that a similar mechanism will work for melodic sequences if two conditions are met. First, the melodic sequences must be represented such that two sequences judged to be similar by the ear have an overlapping distributed representation. Next, a mechanism must be posited to separate melodic sequences into significant groups. The results of a network accomplishing these tasks are presented.