This paper reports a study wherein assumptions usually associated with theories of visual pattern recognition are applied directly to the proceesing of musical patterns. The investigation was on the effects of musical training, repetition, and objective Complexity on judgments of relativepleasingnessandcamplexityof short musical compositions. Forty subjects judged the pleasingness and complexity of four piano compositions before. during, and after either successive or random repetition. As predicted, pleasingness judgments were found to be a function of both objective complexity and training. Whereas successive repetition precipitated changes in judged pleasingness, random repetition did not. Experiment 2 investigated the effect of interchange of the distinctive rhythm feature which brought about a subsequent reversal in judged complexity ranks. but had no effect on judged pleasingness. It was concluded that pleasingness relates to higher order interaction of features, such as cohesion and variation, and it is argued that the vision‐audition analogue is a useful theoretical framework for future studies of music cogniti