Listening to music in the real world? A critical discussion of Marc Leman's (1995) music and schema theory: Cognitive foundations of systematic musicology *

Abstract Leman's recent book is examined from both musical and scientific perspectives. The book describes an important new development in the context‐sensitive modeling of musical pitch perception, and a promising basis for the modeling of other musical parameters such as timbre, and even emotion. The main advantage of the approach is its ecological validity: as far as current limitations of knowledge and technology allow, the model realistically simulates, or attempts to simulate, various peripheral and central parts of human auditory physiology; and the input to the model is not the artificial constructs of music theory or even notated music, but real, sounding music. Leman describes how schema of musical pitch perception can develop by listening to music, and how they may consequently be used to monitor the tonality of real pieces. A major unresolved problem is that, according to the various simulations presented in the book, the more complex models do not necessarily perform better than the simpler m...

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