REDUCED MEMORY REPRESENTATIONS FOR MUSIC

We address the problem of musical variation (identification of differe nt musical sequences as variations) and its implications for mental re presentations of music. According to reductionist theories, listeners judge the structural importance of musical events while forming mental representations. These judgments may result from the production of re duced memory representations that retain only the musical gist. In a s tudy of improvised music performance, pianists produced variations on melodies. Analyses of the musical events retained across variations pr ovided support for the reductionist account of structural importance. A neural network trained to produce reduced memory representations for the same melodies represented structurally important events more effi ciently than others. Agreement among the musicians' improvisations, th e network model, and music-theoretic predictions suggest that perceive d constancy across musical variation is a natural result of a reductio nist mechanism for producing memory representations.