Searching for Beauty in Music — Applications of Zipf ’ s Law in MIDI - Encoded Music

This project applies Zipf's law on musical pieces encoded in MIDI. Our hypothesis is that this will allow us to identify musical pieces that humans find “pleasing, beautiful, harmonious.” Specifically, we have identified an initial set of attributes (metrics) of music pieces on which to apply Zipf’s law. These metrics include pitch of musical events, duration of musical events, the combination of pitch and duration of musical events, and several others. Our preliminary results—derived mostly by tedious manual processing—are encouraging. We are working on automating our metrics so that we can test our hypothesis on a wide variety of music genres (baroque, classical, 20 century, blues, jazz, etc.). If this project is successful, we plan to investigate how such metrics may be used to generate computer music that sounds “pleasing, beautiful, harmonious.”