Can Beautiful Music be Recognized by Computers?
Nature, Music, and the Zipf-Mandelbrot Law


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


Abstract
We discuss the application of the Zipf-Mandelbrot law 
to musical pieces encoded in MIDI.  Specifically, we 
have identified a set of metrics on which to apply this 
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 
hypothesis is that these metrics will allow us to 
computationally identify and perhaps emphasize aesthetic 
aspects of music.  We have developed a system that automates 
calculation of these metrics in MIDI-encoded pieces.  Using 
this tool we conducted a study on a corpus of 220 pieces 
from baroque, classical, romantic, 12-tone, jazz, rock, DNA 
strings, and random music.  Our results support the above 
hypothesis.  We discuss limitations, and how to minimize 
the potential for statistical error through composite 
metrics.  We present possible applications and an overview 
of preliminary work in computer-aided music composition.