Musical Relevance: a Computational Approach

This study is a first attempt at formalizing the concept of Musi- cal Relevance from a cognitive and computational perspective. We elaborate on Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory, and extend it to account for musical cognition, involving both lis- tening and understanding. Our claim is that the application of the concept of Cognitive Relevance to music would permit us to partially explain hearers’ behavior and composers’ choices. A computational model of Musical Relevance could also con- tribute to the formulation of a general computational theory of musical cognition. In turn, formulating an algorithm to com- pute Musical Relevance can shed light on the computational nature of the broader cognitive principle of relevance. We pro- pose to unify Relevance Theory with the Generative Theory of Tonal Music, in order to compute Musical Relevance. We started implementing a system to test the proposed approach over simple examples and report about the results in a prelim- inary experimentation.