• Author(s): Johan Brinch
• Supervisor(s): Jakob Grue Simonsen
• Link: brinchj-2008_music.pdf [ preview ]

Abstract

I investigate trends in musical complexity, specially by computing the entropy of chord sequences.

I analyse 571 Mozart pieces (of 626 in total ). The result shows an increase in entropy over time in at least five categories, specially divertimentos and serenades, piano pieces, piano trios, string quartets and symphonies. And increase in entropy is also observed as the works grow larger; the correlation between chord mass and entropy is shown to be 0.59. Furthermore, I show that operas generally has the highest entropy (2.47), while canons and songs has the lowest (0.86 and 0.74 respectively).

The results are based on Mozart works only, thus only applies to these. However the framework used to compute the results is general and can be reused or expanded in future studies.

The results show promise for entropy as a measure for musical complexity.

Keywords

music, scores, notes, pdf, music xml, ocr, optical character recognition, mozart, entropy, statistics, scannings