Temporal Knowledge and Musical Perception: Application to Auditive Illusions

This paper proposes some clues for a formal framework for representing and manipulating knowledge about musical perception. Our purpose is to set up a perception model that will enable us to simulate the behaviour of an agent in listening situation. It will lead to produce an “intelligent” representation of a piece of music. We apply ourselves here to characterize intervention of Time in the musical perception in initiating a formal comparison between several models. Reasoning within a classical time logic supposes to take a priori time as a cause to describe the nature of knowledge. Our approach consists in supposing that the structure of knowledge a posteriori informs time; thus the nature of time is a consequence of the interpretation of events. This means we have to distinguish Universal Time from a bunchof Musical Times. We focus on some auditives illusions for their capacity to show particular properties of Musical Time.