Progress towards recognizing and classifying beautiful music with computers - MIDI-encoded music and the Zipf-Mandelbrot law

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. 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. An experimental study of 33 MIDI-encoded pieces supports this hypothesis.