Because the article 'Music and Cognitive Science’ was so interesting, I decided to further the study by reading Dr. Temperley’s book called Music and Probability. It was very interesting. But it was so darn hard!
I love music, and I wish I could know more about it to understand it better.
As a person with basic knowledge of music, the book was really hard to read, plus the math was really hard too :(
His introduction made perfect sense, and I was so excited when he mentioned that I would only need my basic understanding of math and music to follow him. Unfortunately, that didn’t turn out to be true. I wish I could read it from cover to cover with full understanding one day, but this time, I just skimmed it.
Basically, this book is about using the Bayesian probability to model the structure and perception of music, just as the Bayesian probability is used in linguistics to make sentences from the finite number of words.
This is his purpose of the book: “...the work I present here is interdisciplinary in nature. The underlying aim is to uncover the mental process and representations involved in musical behaviors - listening, performing, and composing... My assumption is that, by trying to model aspects of cognition such as key-finding, error detection, and the like, we can gain insight into how these processes work in the human mind”.
It is truly amazing that musicologists have worked to map the structure of music. It is also amazing that scientists have used probability to map our minds’ perception. Although, there is still more work to be done, I think that this research will really give cognitive science a really bright future.
I love music, and I wish I could know more about it to understand it better.
As a person with basic knowledge of music, the book was really hard to read, plus the math was really hard too :(
His introduction made perfect sense, and I was so excited when he mentioned that I would only need my basic understanding of math and music to follow him. Unfortunately, that didn’t turn out to be true. I wish I could read it from cover to cover with full understanding one day, but this time, I just skimmed it.
Basically, this book is about using the Bayesian probability to model the structure and perception of music, just as the Bayesian probability is used in linguistics to make sentences from the finite number of words.
This is his purpose of the book: “...the work I present here is interdisciplinary in nature. The underlying aim is to uncover the mental process and representations involved in musical behaviors - listening, performing, and composing... My assumption is that, by trying to model aspects of cognition such as key-finding, error detection, and the like, we can gain insight into how these processes work in the human mind”.
It is truly amazing that musicologists have worked to map the structure of music. It is also amazing that scientists have used probability to map our minds’ perception. Although, there is still more work to be done, I think that this research will really give cognitive science a really bright future.