Abstract
We considered musical note frequencies of the 88 keys of the piano and found that they are Benford distributed. We extended our focus beyond the 88 keys and found the connection to Benford holds for the lowest note measuring at 16.35 Hertz (Hz) to the highest note of 7902.13 Hz. We next investigated whether the distribution holds within specific types of music. We found that classical music such as a random sample of songs from the Romantic period adhere to the Benford distribution while modern music such as a random sampling of songs from the 2000s do not. We also coined a term called “Naturalness” to assess how well a song adheres to the Benford distribution.
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Nelson, S.P., Wickman, B., Null, J., Gazin, E. (2022). Benford’s Law and Music Note Frequencies. In: Montiel, M., Agustín-Aquino, O.A., Gómez, F., Kastine, J., Lluis-Puebla, E., Milam, B. (eds) Mathematics and Computation in Music. MCM 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13267. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07015-0_34
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07015-0_34
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