Musical Networks: Parallel Distributed Perception and Performance

Some 50,000 years ago, our Neanderthal ancestors may have created the first artifacts-bone flutes--to help produce tonal music (Wilford, 1996). About a decade ago, Rumelhart and McClelland (1986) first widely introduced a new set of computational tools--parallel distributed processing (PDP) models of human cognition--that could help us further understand the musical legacy of the past 50 millennia. Five years later, the first book on the musical uses of these new computational tools was published (Todd & Loy, 1991), and now, after a similarly short period of time, we present the current volume with the hope of summarizing the latest work in this field.