# Template‐matching models of musical pitch and rhythm perception Richard Parncutt **Abstract:** The perception of familiar patterns in pitch and time may be modeled by template matching. Music-perceptual templates may be represented graphically as sets of appropriately weighted template elements or features, defined relative to each other by fixed (but approximate) time or frequency ratios. The salience of a sensation arising from the recognition of a pattern may be estimated from the goodness of fit between a template and an incoming stimulus. The weights assigned to template elements reflect their perceptual importances. Musical templates are predominantly culture-specific. In western music, meter templates (or profiles) may be used to model the perceptual determination of downbeat (Palmer & Krumhansl 1990), tonality templates (major and minor key profiles) to model the determination of the tonic (Krumhansl & Kessler 1982), and chord templates to model the determination of chord-roots (Parncutt 1988). Culture-specific meter, tonality, and chord templates may have "evolved" from universal pulse and tone templates. Pulse and tone templates enable the identification of periodic or repetitive sound sources in the everyday human environment, pulse templates (Parncutt 1987) for sources whose frequencies are relatively low (roughly 0.5 to 5 Hz), and tone templates (Goldstein 1973; Terhardt 1972) for sources whose frequencies are relatively high (roughly 50 to 2000 Hz). Pulse and tone templates may arise from exposure of the auditory system to universal patterns of sound: hum **Authors:** [[Publisher: Routledge]]