Music cognition is an interdisciplinary field devoted to investigating the cognitive processes that underlie musical activities. Given that musical behaviors involve auditory parsing, attention, memory, emotional decoding, psychophysiological responses, fine and gross motor skills, rhythmic entrainment, semantic attribution, and the hierarchical representation of sequential structures, music can be used as a tool by which to target and study each of these cognitive activities.

We use several experimental methods to learn about the cognitive processes underlying the perception and production of music. Behavioral measures (such as reaction times, error rates, and vocal productions) allow us to probe cognitive processes and neural representations. Neural networks allow us to model human perception of pitch and tonality. We use acoustic analyses and statistical modeling to map acoustic codes to perceptual representations.