Music's Secret Mathematical Formula?

A number of years ago, I had a conversation with Rivers Cuomo of Weezer on the nature of songwriting. He told me that having studied music at Harvard as well as being in a succesful alt-pop band, he had become interested in the mathematical nature of songwriting.  No doubt he'll be most interested in this story.

Daniel Levitin, the record producer-turned-neuroscientist who has written books like This is Your Brain on Music, has been doing some work with something called the "one-over-f" (1/f) power distribution equation. This math describes the relative frequency of things and can be applied to all sorts of occurrences in nature and the universe.

One-over-f equations have been used to descibe the use of pitch in music.  But it's taken this long for someone to investigate if anything can be applied to the rhythm of music.

From Physorg.com:

Levitin and his team analyzed (by measuring note length line by line) close to 2000 pieces of classical music from a wide group of noted composers. In so doing, they found that virtually every piece studied conformed to the power law. They also found that by adding another variable to the equation, called a beta, which was used to describe just how predictable a given piece was compared to other pieces, they could solve for beta and find a unique number of for each composer.

After looking at the results as a whole, they found that works written by some classical composers were far more predictable than others, and that certain genres in general were more predictable than others too.

Is this the mathematical solution to what Rivers and so many others have been looking for?

Comments

[zara]

Enjoyed reading this, very good stuff, thankyou . "Success doesn't come to you...you go to it." by Marva Collins.