{"pk":25861,"title":"Cognitive representations of form in pop music: A probabilistic grammars\napproach","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Cognitive representations of musical structure have long been of interest to psychologists and musicians. This\nproject addresses comprehension of and long-term memory for musical form, a debated topic in music cognition. We use three\nmethods: a corpus of Billboard magazine’s top 10 songs for each of the last 20 years; a probabilistic grammar derived from\nthis corpus; and an experiment testing predictions of the grammar. Two statistical analyses of the corpus are presented here,\ndealing with its zero- and first-order Markov properties. These provide a probablistic grammar of form in popular songs. We\nhave tested this grammar by prompted recall of listeners’ memory for popular songs they claim to know well. Recalls average\nover 70% correct; errors in these recalls most often correspond to low-frequency 2-tuples in our networks. Our results show\nthat listeners learn statistical regularities of form in popular music, much as they learn melodic and harmonic structure.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[],"section":"Member Abstracts","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6dp4t90g","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Richard","middle_name":"","last_name":"Ashley","name_suffix":"","institution":"Northwestern University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2015-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/25861/galley/15485/download/"}]}