From Bach to the Beatles: The simulation of human tonal expectation using ecologically-trained predictive models

Abstract: Tonal structure is in part conveyed by statistical regularities between musical events, and research has shown that computational models reflect tonal structure in music by capturing these regularities in schematic constructs like pitch histograms. Of the few studies that model the acquisition of perceptual learning from musical data, most have employed self-organizing models that learn a topology of static descriptions of musical contexts. Also, the stimuli used to train these models are often symbolic rather than acoustically faithful representations of musical material. In this work we investigate whether sequential predictive models of musical memory (specifically, recurrent neural networks), trained on audio from commercial CD recordings, induce tonal knowledge in a similar manner to listeners (as shown in behavioral studies in music perception). Our experiments indicate that various types of recurrent neural networks produce musical expectations that clearly convey tonal structure. Furthermore, the results imply that although implicit knowledge of tonal structure is a necessary condition for accurate musical expectation, the most accurate predictive models also use other cues beyond the tonal structure of the musical context.