A general overview of what we knows about memory.
Some key concepts introduced in this chapter.
Short Term and Long Term Memory (STM, LTM) * Chunking * episodic and semantic memory * Schema and a nice illustration * Generative Theory of Tonal Music (GTTM) * Cue Abstraction
What kind of experimental evidence can we gather about musical memory?
Deutsch study about time span between two tones * Conditions for recognition of familiar melodies (for example) * related segments to their location in a piece of music after listening.
"This means that listeners tend to not have exact detailed memories of music, but more generalized memories about the kinds of events that were heard; hence a listener's repertoire of categories of musical events (knowledge in memory) will affect what they can and do remember."
Composer P. Hindemith intuitively sensed this when he described the listener:
"While listening to the musical structure, as it unfolds before his ears, he is mentally constructing parallel to it and simultaneously with it a mirrored image. Registering the composition's components as they reach him he tries to match them with their corresponding parts of his mental construction. Or he merely surmises the composition's presumable course and compares it with the image of a musical structure which after a former experience he had stored away in his memory"
(Quoted in Cohen, Information theory and music. Behavioral Science, 1962 7(2), 137–163).
Compare this to the concept of Schema:
"A mental preconception of the normal course of events. Schemas may be viewed as mental templates or scenarios that influence how an individual perceives and interprets current events."
(from Huron's Music Cognition Handbook)