Music Education: An Artificial Intelligence Approach

The research fields of 'artificial intelligence and music' and 'cognitive musicology' are relative newcomers to the many interdisciplinary groupings based around the centre of AI and cognitive science. They are concerned with the computational study and emulation of human behaviour with respect to music, in many aspects, and with varying degrees of emphasis on psychological plausibility. Recent publications have included work in such diverse areas as rhythm and pitch perception, performance, composition, and formal analysis. Music shares with language the property of giving access to human mental behaviour in a very direct way. As such, it has the potential to be a very useful domain for AI work. Furthermore, in the course of time, AI related work will surely throw light back onto some or all of the fields to which it is applied. Indeed, we are already beginning to feel the benefits of the application of AI techniques to music technology. It is not surprising, therefore, that one of the first areas interest for of musical AI study is that of music education. There are many ways in which an artificial intelligence or cognitive science approach to music education may be applied - for example, to automate tuition, to explain learning processes, to provide metaphors for human computer interaction, and so on. This collection of papers, which is intended to give an impression of both the breadth and depth of the field, originated from a workshop entitled 'Music Education: An Artificial Intelligence Approach'.