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A Music Module in Working Memory? Evidence from the Performance of a Prodigious Musical Savant

This article investigates the possible existence and nature of a “music module” in working memory after Baddeley (1986) and Berz (1995). Evidence is gleaned from the performance of a prodigious musical savant in hearing and playing back an unfamiliar piece. His ability to realise internalised auditory images of considerable complexity on the keyboard with immediacy and an unusual technical facility offers a rare opportunity to glean something of the workings of the musical mind in a direct and ecologically valid way — through purely musical responses. These are subject to an initial musicological analysis using “zygonic” theory (Ockelford, 2005a, 2005b), which seeks to explain how the structure and content of the savant's output is derived from the stimulus and from other sources, and how both are woven into a coherent musical whole. The underlying methodological assumption is that the perceived sonic relationships so identified offer powerful evidence of processes that are hypothesised to underlie the learning, storage and retrieval of musical elements in cognition.