Progress Towards Recognizing and Classifying Beautiful Music with Computers
--MIDI-Encoded Music and the Zipf-Mandelbrot Law


Bill Manaris, Tarsem Purewal, and Charles McCormick
Computer Science Department
College of Charleston


Technical Report CoC-CS TR#2001-7-2
November 7, 2001


Abstract


We discuss the application of the Zipf-Mandelbrot law on 
musical pieces encoded in MIDI.  Our hypothesis is that 
this will allow us to computationally identify and emphasize 
aesthetic aspects of music. Specifically, we have identified 
an initial set of attributes (metrics) of music pieces on 
which to apply the Zipf-Mandelbrot 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 results 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, 20th 
century, blues, jazz, etc.).  If this project is successful, 
we plan to investigate how such metrics may be used in various 
areas such as music education, music therapy, music recognition 
by computers, and computer-aided music analysis/composition.