This presentation discusses modeling research designed to obtain insights into the perception and recognition of musical melodies. We focus on data obtained by Dalla Bella, Peretz, and Aronoff that compares performance between musicians and nonmusicians in the recognition (and perception) of melodies.
Based on analogy to the cohort model in speech recognition, Dalla Bella et al. used a gating task to identify three events in the melody perception/recognition process. These are the familiarity emergence point (FEP), the isolation point (IP), and the recognition point (RP).We develop a simulation to model processes underlying these events. The IP is modeled using a winner-take-all connectionist recognition network adapted to operate with temporal input sequences. Meta-level processes which examine the dynamic state of the recognition network model the emergence of the FEP and the RP. Preliminary results are presented and future research is outlined.