from a piece of music than a nonprofessitrnal. who may only have the capacity to listen to one line of Violins,or even to listen to the general musical sound alone, What is called here the"context" of the music. The person may even possibly not understand anything at all: What is then heard is "noise."
Complexity of a piece of music being a variable of musical
talent,will be able gradually to differentiate between students and professionals. Talent is thought of as something anybody
possesses to some degree. This approach involves thinking of music as a stimulus system with a specific grade of complexity,complexity defined here as the structure of the basic musical context (for instance, the harmonic systems within a piece)_
the basic system—and the sum of interacting and parallel on_
going subsystems (e.g.. the music lines of different istruments). Processing music would thus involve parallel,
continuous interactive systems. as described by Rumelhart and McClelland (1986).
Aspecific musical piece the total stimulus system inputactivates the listener's combined emotional and cognitive systems through the basic structures and processes related to emotional reactions and through the interacting and parallel
subsystems related
to integrating emotional and cognitive data.
As a continuous parallel interacting system is involved, there is
continous interaction between the level of
context (basic system) and the subsystems, and vice versa. Activation through the
basic system is nonspecific
in the sense described by Magoun
(1963), and involves the limbic system, the emotion center, and the ascending
reticular activating system (ARAS) (Rosenzweig&leiman,1990; Werbik, 1971). There is specific (additive, individual)
activation through the subsystems.(reference is made also to the theory of short-term memory and the importance of rehearsal, as sublines
of music are repeated very often in a heterogeneous mode [Atkinson & shiffrin,1968].)
The level of activation resulting from an individual complex musical input is detemined by "pacer level." Any complex
musical stimulus configuration gives a certain emotional activation status to the individual. Under the condition that all stimuli of that complex system can be completely recognized by the individual,he or she is said to have reached the pacer level,the maximum possible input activation the specific individual can arrive at.the activation level of an individal, when listening
to music at a certain time, must be very near to the total available output activation capacity of the music if the level of that individual's