Myhill's Thesis: There's More than Computing in Musical Thinking

Abstract

Cognitive musicology (Laske 1988) is the study of musical thinking from a computational point of view. Like cognitive science, of which it is a part, cognitive musicology tends to focus on processes of musical thinking, rather than on products. Thus, for example, in the study of Beethoven's piano sonatas, cognitive musicology would not focus on the sonatas themselves, but on the processes that Beethoven used to compose them, that Serkin uses to perform them, or that a typical listener uses to listen to them. Like cognitive science generally, it tries to characterize these processes in computational terms.