Melodic Cue Abstraction, Similarity and Category Formation: A Computational Approach

One significant component of musical understanding is the abilit y of listeners to cluster together musical materials into categories such as motives, themes and so on. Sa lie t musical features enable listeners to make similarity judgements between various musical material s and to organise these materials in meaningful groups. It is maintained, in this study, that feature sa li nce, similarity judgements and categorisation processes are inextricably bound together in a way that ea c of these can be defined only in relation to the rest.