ence. For instance, Deliege and El Ahmahdi (1990) showed that musicians and
nonmusicians were remarkabl ysimilar in the segmentations the ysuggested for
an atonal piece. That ma yhave been partl yattributable to the relative unfa-
miliarit yof the genre to both groups. More strikingl y, Bigand (1990) showed
that nonmusicians had an abilit ysimilar to that of musicians to classif ysuper-
ficiall ydifferent conventional tonal melodies into groups containing underl ying
structural similarities. Studies of memor yrecall for melodies (Sloboda & Parker,
1985) have shown that musicians and nonmusicians have similar abilities to
preserve higher-order structure at the expense of note-to-note detail.
The research literature, therefore, leads to the conclusion that human beings
pick up quite high-level implicit (or tacit) knowledge about some major struc-
tural features of the music of their culture. The ygraduall yimprove their abilit y
to do this over the first ten or more years of life and preserve this ability into
adulthood. We ma ypresume that this is achieved through informal engage-
ment in the everyday musical activities that abound in almost all human cul-
tures (e.g., nursery rhymes, hymns, dances, popular songs, playground games).
In our own culture these forms are, of course, massivel yreinforced through the
broadcast media.
In this way, almost every member of a culture is a musical expert, but the
expertise is usuall yhidden and tacit. It ma ynot exhibit itself in abilities to sing
or play. It is, however, manifested in a variety of perceptual and memory tasks.
Nearl yall of us can identif ysome kinds of ‘‘wrong notes’’ when we hear them,
even though we cannot always say why the notes are ‘‘wrong.’’
Tacit expertise depends, in part, on being in a culture in which one is ex-
posed to products in the specified domain without the necessit yfor active
engagement. This allows the dissociation between receptive expertise and pro-
ductive expertise. Such a dissociation would not normall yoccur in chess, or
bridge, or ph ysics, because the onl ywa yone normall ygets exposure to the
relevant structures is bydoingthe activity.
It is not the purpose of this essa yto give an account of the various develop-
ments in understanding what it is that people know when the yknow about
music structure. Suffice it to sa ythat it seems necessar yto postulate mecha-
nisms for representing music that are multidimensional and hierarchical. This
means that music can be characterized b ypoints of greater or lesser promi-
nence or distance from one another and that various dimensions ma ybe in
synchrony or in opposition. This gives rise to complex patterns of tension and
resolution at different hierarchical levels. Some of the most influential charac-
terizations of musical representation have been offered b yLerdahl and Jack-
endoff (1983), Krumhansl (1990), and Meyer (1973).
More pertinent for our current purposes is the observation that at least some
of these structures seem capable of being represented in a connectionist net-
work (Bharucha, 1987). A connectionist model of the brain shows one way
in which it might be possible for knowledge of complex structures to be built
up simpl yas a result of frequent exposure to relevant examples. Such an activ-
it yseems to be an essential requirement of an ymechanism that acquires ex-
pertise from environments that are not engineered to be instructional (i.e., most
environments).
Musical Expertise 569