On musical stylometry—a pattern recognition approach

In this short communication we describe some experiments in which methods of statistical pattern recognition are applied for musical style recognition and disputed musical authorship attribution. Values of a set of 20 features (also called ‘‘style markers’’) are measured in the scores of a set of compositions, mainly describing the different sonorities in the compositions. For a first study over 300 different compositions of Bach, Handel, Telemann, Mozart and Haydn were used and from this data set it was shown that even with a few features, the styles of the various composers could be separated with leave-one-out-error rates varying from 4% to 9% with the exception of the confusion between Mozart and Haydn which yielded a leave-one-out-error rate of 24%. A second experiment included 30 fugues from J.S. Bach, W.F. Bach and J.L. Krebs, all of different style and character. With this data set of compositions of undisputed authorship, the F minor fugue for organ, BWV 534 (of which Bach s authorship is disputed) then was confronted. It could be concluded that there is experimental evidence that J.L. Krebs should be considered in all probability as the composer of the fugue in question. 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.