摘要：Music perception has a long and distinguished history as a topic of psychological research because music requires a mental activity in humans. As a complex human activity, music perception is naturally an area of interest especially to cognitive psychology. Cognitive studies suggest that listener's experience of a particular musical sequence is driven and at the same time constrained by the sounds registered by auditory mechanisms but also processed by available mental resources. This assumption indicates that researchers must take into account certain inherent limitations and capabilities of the listener. The main purpose of this paper is to discuss possible cognitive processes underlying music perception. The steps taken towards this purpose will be describing the structure of music and discussing the way that this structure is perceived by human cognition.
