Music and modularity

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Abstract
It is argued that the current modular conception of the human mind has important implications for the status of music processing in the architecture of the cognitive system. This conceptualization led us to treat several issues that have been neglected in the cognitive study of music. The major issue concerns the importance of specifying both models and experimental tasks in terms of stages in information processing. This approach is advocated as a preliminary step for identifying separable components in the processing of music and for assessing whether these comonents possess modular properties. In this perspective, and on the grounds of the available empirical facts, encoding of pitch information in terms of tonal scales is suggested to be a serious candidate for modularity. These computations appear to be made in an automatic way and seem to be acquired precociously and without explicit tutoring. This would support the proposal that music processing cannot be wholly attributed to general-purpose mechanisms.