Learning music : prospects about implicit knowledge in music, new technologies and music education

The chapter proposes an overview of musical learning by underlining the force of the cognitive system, which is able to learn and to treat complex information at an implicit level. The first part summarises recent research in cognitive sciences, that studies the processes of implicit learning in music perception. These studies show that the abilities of non-musicians in perceiving music are very often comparable to those of musicians. The second part illustrates by means of some examples the use of multimedia tools for learning tonal and atonal music; these tools take advantage of the interaction between visual and auditive modalities.