The central purpose of this paper is to elaborate on the methodology for computational modeling and to show how, although it should in principle be instrumental in the understanding of the structure of musical knowledge and the processes involved in music cognition, it in practice too often degenerates into a loose "if you want to understand the theory, here look in my program" approach. We will show how many issues cannot be decided by inspecting computer programs as they are written nowadays, and we will indicate a possible solution, giving examples from the field of music cognition research.

Full paper (pdf).