In recent years, the study of music perception and cognition has witnessed an enormous growth of interest. Music cognition is an intrinsically interdisciplinary subject which combines insights and research methods from many of the cognitive sciences. This trend is clearly reflected, for example, in the contributions in special issues on music, published by journals such as Nature, Cognition, Nature Neuroscience, and Connection Science.This symposium focuses on music learning and processing and will feature perspectives from cognitive neuroscience, experimental psychology, computational modeling, linguistics, and musicology. The objective is to bring together researchers from different research fields and traditions in order to discuss the progress made, and future directions to take, in the interdisciplinary study of music cognition. The symposium also aims to illustrate how closely the area of music cognition is linked to topics and debates in the cognitive sciences.