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Introduction 5mon concern or to establish a viewpoint. My good friend and colleagueWilliam Forde Thompson (a music cognition scientist and composer atthe University of Toronto) adds that the work of both scientists andartists involves similar stages of development: a creative and exploratory“brainstorming” stage, followed by testing and refining stages that typicallyinvolve the application of set procedures, but are often informed byadditional creative problem-solving. Artists’ studios and scientists’ laboratoriesshare similarities as well, with a large number of projects goingat once, in various stages of incompletion. Both require specializedtools, and the results are—unlike the final plans for a suspension bridge,or the tallying of money in a bank account at the end of the businessday—open to interpretation. What artists and scientists have in commonis the ability to live in an open-ended state of interpretation and reinterpretationof the products of our work. The work of artists and scientistsis ultimately the pursuit of truth, but members of both camps understandthat truth in its very nature is contextual and changeable, dependent onpoint of view, and that today’s truths become tomorrow’s disproven hypothesesor forgotten objets d’art. One need look no further than Piaget,Freud, and Skinner to find theories that once held widespread currencyand were later overturned (or at least dramatically reevaluated). In music,a number of groups were prematurely held up as of lasting importance:Cheap Trick were hailed as the new Beatles, and at one time theRolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock devoted as much space to Adamand the Ants as they did to U2. There were times when people couldn’timagine a day when most of the world would not know the names PaulStookey, Christopher Cross, or Mary Ford. For the artist, the goal of thepainting or musical composition is not to convey literal truth, but an aspectof a universal truth that if successful, will continue to move and totouch people even as contexts, societies, and cultures change. For thescientist, the goal of a theory is to convey “truth for now”—to replace anold truth, while accepting that someday this theory, too, will be replacedby a new “truth,” because that is the way science advances.Music is unusual among all human activities for both its ubiquity andits antiquity. No known human culture now or anytime in the recorded