Two Issues in Auditory Cognition: Self-Organization of Octave Categories and Pitch-Invariant Pattern Recognition

Abstract

The study of auditory and music cognition provides opportunities to explore general cognitive mechanisms in a specific, highly structured domain We discuss two problems with implications for other domains of perception the self-organization of perceptual categories and invariant pattern recognition The perceptual category we consider is the octave We show how general principles of self-organization operating on a cochlear spectral representation can yield octave categories The example of invariant pattern recognition we consider is the recognition of invariant frequency patterns transformed to different absolute frequencies We suggest a system that uses pitch or musical key to map tones into a pitch-invariant format