Music is a form of auditory communication involving highly complex, temporally structured sequences of events.  Like language, music is universal among humans.  The universality of certain musical features suggests that general principles of neural computation underlie musical behavior.  Such principles could provide a set of innate constraints that shape human musical behavior and enable children to acquire musical knowledge.

We are exploring a new way to think about the musical experience, emphasizing the neural processes underlying pitch, rhythm and tonality.  Consideration of neural process leads us to a description of musical structure that is inherently dynamic.  This, in turn, leads to the hypothesis that our qualitative experiences of musical sound patterns reflect not only the physics of sound, but also the dynamical interaction of musical sounds with the physics of the auditory system.