Music Cognition Research Research Articles

Asking Children to Think About Music

The traditionally held operant definitions of creative and critical thinking betray a dichotomy particularly when applied to music education. However, boundaries between creative and critical thinking have blurred as the result of recent developments in music cognition research. Research directions and policy issues need to be approached from a much more global understanding of musical thinking as a function of both cognitive and affective components.

Asking Children to Think about Music

The traditionally held operant definitions of creative and critical thinking betray a dichotomy particularly when applied to music education. However, boundaries between creative and critical thinking have blurred as the result of recent developments in music cognition research. Research directions and policy issues need to be approached from a much more global understanding of musical thinking as a function of both cognitive and affective components.

A microworld approach to the formalization of musical knowledge

This paper is about the importance of applying computational modeling and artificial intelligence techniques to music cognition and computer music research. The construction of microworlds as a methodology plays a key role in the different stages of this research. Several uses of microworlds are described. Microworlds have been criticized in the domains of artificial intelligence and the cognitive sciences, but this critique has to be seen in its proper context (i.e. in modeling of human intelligence, not as a methodology). It is shown that the microworld approach is still an important methodology in music cognition and computer music research, and a promising strategy in the design of a general representation formalism of musical knowledge.