Music Analysis as the Cognition of Similarity Relationships
Morgan T. Patrick, Daniel T. Shanahan · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2025
Abstract What does it mean for two musical ideas to sound similar? To what extent is this assessment subjective? How do the methods of measuring musical similarity constrain what it means for musical ideas to be similar? At the heart of discussions of musical variation lie some complicated perceptual questions about how we hear musical ideas to be identical, similar, or contrasting. Furthermore, the fact that these perceptions are culturally and historically situated (and highly varied between individuals) only adds to the complexity of the issue. These questions have been asked for centuries by both music theorists and psychologists, often in parallel, non-intersecting discussions about what it means to perceive multiple ideas in relation to one another. This chapter examines the study of similarity through the lens of music cognition, surveying four canonical approaches to measuring similarity in the cognitive sciences—spatial distance, feature set intersection, transformation, and alignment—and tracing their influence in music theory scholarship. It introduces the notion of similarity as a fixed distance between objects based upon independent dimensions or features. It examines the efficacy of such measurements before moving on to studies focusing on “relational” similarity, in which the connections between features and the mental act of comparing objects influences perceived similarity. Each approach entertains the variability of human responses and the analytic context in which similarity is measured. The chapter concludes by centering one of these approaches—structural alignment—as a central cognitive and analytic mechanism underlying music theory scholarship at the larger scale.