This book presents a coherent state-of-the-art survey on the area of systematic and cognitive musicology which has enjoyed dynamic growth now for many years. It is devoted to exploring the relationships between acoustics, human information processing, and culture as well as to methodological issues raised by the widespread use of computers as a powerful tool for theory construction, theory testing, and the manipulation of musical information or any kind of data manipulation related to music. The book comes with a CD providing sound examples for various chapters; it contains a comprehensive name and subject index and the following chapters: Gestalt theory revisited, from pitch to harmony, from rhythm to expectation, from timbre to texture, from musical expression to interactive computer systems.