Home – Home – Jornals – Philosophy of Sciences 2024 number 4

Cognitive studies of music have a long history. Thoughts that are consonant with today’s ideas were expressed by G.W. Leibniz in the early 18th century, reconsidered by A. Schopenhauer and got a new impetus after the so-called cognitive revolution, when everything related to cognition was agreed to be understood as the processing of symbols according to rules. People use symbols to record natural speech, which is the main means of information exchange, to operate with quantities and to store musical ideas, but the rules of these symbolic systems differ significantly. That is why within the framework of the classical cognitive approach, the point of view presented in the works of F. Lerdahl and R. Jackendoff prevailed, according to which the talk about the semantics of music in a traditional sense is not relevant, although some neurophysiological data indicate at least a mutual overlap of the “speech” and “musical” regions of the brain. This approach was based on the classical understanding of computation as a rule-based manipulation of symbols. At the current stage of development of cognitive sciences, such an understanding is clearly insufficient. One must distinguish between natural computations and their representations in conscious operations and human communication. The approach, now known as predictive coding, offers a kind of “soft” understanding of computation as any transformation of information, defining the latter (following C. Shannon) as anything that reduces uncertainty. Using Bayesian probabilistic methods, proponents of this concept show possible ways to resolve some paradoxes in neurophysiological data regarding the processing of musical information by the brain.,