2 ISSUES IN AUDITORY COGNITION - SELF-ORGANIZATION OF OCTAVE CATEGORIES AND PITCH-INVARIANT PATTERN-RECOGNITION

The study of auditory and music cognition provides opportunities to ex plore general cognitive mechanisms in a specific, highly structured do main. We discuss two problems with implications for other domains of p erception: the self-organization of perceptual categories and invarian t pattern recognition. The perceptual category we consider is the octa ve. We show how general principles of self-organization operating on a cochlear spectral representation can yield octave categories. The exa mple of invariant pattern recognition we consider is the recognition o f invariant frequency patterns transformed to different absolute frequ encies. We suggest a system that uses pitch or musical key to map tone s into a pitch-invariant format.