Abstract
A study on a 220-piece corpus (baroque, classical, romantic, 12-tone, jazz, rock, DNA strings, and random music) reveals that aesthetically pleasing music may be describable under the Zipf-Mandelbrot law. Various Zipf-based metrics have been developed and evaluated. Some focus on music-theoretic attributes such as pitch, pitch and duration, melodic intervals, and harmonic intervals. Others focus on higher-order attributes and fractal aspects of musical balance. Zipf distributions across certain dimensions appear to be a necessary, but not sufficient condition for pleasant music. Statistical analyses suggest that combinations of Zipf-based metrics might be used to identify genre and/or composer. This is supported by a preliminary experiment with a neural network classifier. We describe an evolutionary music framework under development, which utilizes Zipf-based metrics as fitness functions.
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Manaris, B., Vaughan, D., Wagner, C., Romero, J., Davis, R.B. (2003). Evolutionary Music and the Zipf-Mandelbrot Law: Developing Fitness Functions for Pleasant Music. In: Cagnoni, S., et al. Applications of Evolutionary Computing. EvoWorkshops 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2611. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36605-9_48
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36605-9_48
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