| PSYCHOACOUSTIC | PREFERENCE RULE | CONNECTIONIST | |
| Advocates: | Ernst Terhardt, Richard Parncutt | Fred Lerdahl, Davy Temperley | Jamshed Bharucha |
| Inspiration: | Hearing sciences | Linguistics | Neural networks |
| Approach: | Connects experimental psychoacoustic research to concepts in Western harmony | Explication of systems of preference rules for meter, key, pitch-spelling, harmony, etc. | Creation of connectionist networks that emulate harmony-related behaviors |
| Strengths: | Accounts for roots of major and minor chords; accounts for why the diminished triad sounds better in 1st inversion; accounts for root ambiguity in chords such as the diminished 7th and the "Tristan" chord; accounts for root doubling. | Can perform a plausible Roman-numeral-type analysis; can decipher correct enharmonic pitch spelling; can determine meter | Accounts for the phenomenon of priming due to spreading activation |
| Additional Strengths: | Sensitivity to tessitura, masking, timbres; sensitivity to whether listener hears analytically or synthetically | Emulates "garden-path" phenomenon | Provides plausible account for anchoring |
| Theoretical Issues: | Emphasis on peripheral auditory system. | Status of preference rules is obscure; not well-connected to the mechanics of ear or mind | Not grounded in hearing science but neurologically plausible; problem of indicating output states for training. |
| Implementation Weaknesses: | Sensitive to numerical weights used. | Sensitive to numerical weights used. | Sensitive to numerical weights used. |
| Empirical Weaknesses: | Pitch commonality weakly supported. | Does not deal with escape tones and other embellishments involving initial leaps. | Incomplete implementation. |
| Origins of Harmony | Harmony is an artifact of pitch perception. | ??? | Harmony is an emergent property of neural wirings. |
| Harmony is learned from exposure to the environment; however, the exposure is to such commonly occurring sounds that some phenomena will appear universal. | No claim made regarding innateness or learned. | Harmony is learned |