Tonal music is a highly structured system that is ubiquitous in our cultural environment. We demonstrate the acquisition of implicit knowledge of tonal structure through neural self-organization resulting from mere exposure to simultaneous and sequential combinations of tones. In the process of learning, a network with fundamental neural constraints comes to internalize the essential correlational structure of tonal music. After learning, the network was run through a range of experiments from the literature. The model provides a parsimonious account of a variety of empirical findings dealing with the processing of tone, chord, and key relationships, including relatedness judgments, memory judgments, and expectancies. It also illustrates the plausibility of activation being a unifying mechanism underlying a range of cognitive tasks. Natural environments contain highly structured systems to which we are exposed in everyday life. The human brain internalizes these regularities by passive exposure, and the acquired implicit knowledge influences perception and performance. Aspects of language and music provide two examples of highly structured systems that may be learned in an incidental manner. In each case, there is a paradox. On the one hand, a thorough formal description of the structure has proven to be extremely challenging. On the other hand, native speakers or nonmusician listeners internalize the regularities underlying linguistic or musical structures with apparent ease. A substantial corpus of research has been devoted to the learning process of language, but little has been devoted to the learning of music. The central purpose of the present article is to investigate how implicit knowledge of some basic features of Western musical grammar may be acquired and mentally represented.Barbara Tillmann, Department of Psychology, Universit6 de Bourgogne, LEAD-CNRS, Dijon, France, and Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College; Jamshed J. Bharucha, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College; Emmanuel Bigand, Department of Psychology, Universit6 de Bourgogne, LEAD-CNRS.This research was supported in part by National Science Foundation Grant SBR-9601287 and National Institutes of Health Grant 2P50 NS17778-18 to Jamshed J. Bharucha and by a grant from the International Foundation for Music Research to Emmanuel Bigand. Barbara Tillmann has been supported by the French Ministry of Education and Research and by the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst DAAD. We thank Herv6 Abdi, Pierre Perruchet, and Philippe Schyns for insightful comments at different stages of the present work and Carol Krumhansl and Fred Lerdahl for comments on the article.Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Barbara Tillmann, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College, 6207 Moore Hall, Hanover, New Hampshire 03755. Electronic mall may be sent to barbara.tillmann@dartmouth.edu.
885We present a connectionist model that (a) simulates the implicit learning of p...
