[Recent trends in the psychology of music perception: the perceptual processes of melody and musical pitch].

In this article some of the recent researches on music perception are reviewed, with a special emphasis upon those that concern melody organization and musical pitch. Lerdahl and Jackendoff (1983) pointed out that there is a grammatical parallel between music and language, and presented some grammatical rules for the tonal music. Serafine (1983) cautioned us not to confuse the "style principles" with the "musical cognitive process". The recent experiments on musical pitch and melody has reinforced the psychological validity of musical segmentation, tonality, pitch chroma, scale, and key. Theoretical approaches to the relations in the scale systems gave the possibility of a "new scale system" for use in psychological experiments, while the recent pitch models has made it possible for us to control tonality and to generate tones never used before in playing music. The need for a greater cross-stylistic generality of psychological concepts in music and the farther clarification of the "musical cognitive process" through experiments utilizing the "new scale system" and the "new tones" are indicated.