Reflections on Music, Models, and Brains · Arun Asthagiri

I had the privelege of attending two really different conferences over the last few weeks. One was the Society for Music Perception and Cognition (SMPC); the other was the Cognitive Computational Neuroscience conference (CCN). Here, I’ll share some reflections from these conferences, focusing on when, why, and how computational models can help us understand music and the brain. At SMPC, I presented on how generatve models of music recapitulate some classic findings in music perception (like octave equivalence and circular key area relationships) and how they can be used to study musical predictions in the brain during naturalistic listening. My goal was to apply recent advances in music and machine learning to better understand music perception in humans. While many of the methods were new, the approach followed from a long tradition of computational modeling in music perception. For instance, early music cognition researchers developed perceptual models of pitch, tonality, and timbre

index 2026.08.07 Reflections on Music, Models, and Brains: SMPC and CCN Conferences 2026 Why I wrote this I had the privelege of attending two really different conferences over the last few weeks. One was the Society for Music Perception and Cognition (SMPC); the other was the Cognitive Computational Neuroscience conference (CCN). Here, I’ll share some reflections from these conferences, focusing on when, why, and how computational models can help us understand music and the brain. At SMPC, I presented on how generatve models of music recapitulate some classic findings in music…

saved by

• Aadharsh Pannirselvam

related reading

• The AI Sound Housemaximevidal.com
• https://io0.github.ioio0.github.io
• Why certain types of music make our brains sing, and others don’ttheconversation.com
• Book Review: Surfing Uncertaintyslatestarcodex.com
• Introduction — Neuromatch Academy: Computational Neurosciencecompneuro.neuromatch.io
• Predictability and Statistical Memory in Classical Sonatas and Quartetsarxiv.org
• Cowley group at CSHLcowleygroup.cshl.edu
• Generating music in the waveform domain – Sander Dielemansander.ai
• Deep neural network models reveal interplay of peripheral coding and stimulus statistics in pitch perceptionmcdermottlab.mit.edu
• Cognitive Computational Neuroscience2026.ccneuro.org
• The Case For World Models, Part I: The Neuroscientific Reasonwheremachinesthink.substack.com
• Do Machine Learning Models Memorize or Generalize?pair.withgoogle.com