On the Typicality of Musical Sequences
This work addresses a problem for researchers in music information retrieval and computational musicology, but it is incremental as it extends known language findings to music.
The paper tackled the problem of whether musical sequences exhibit typicality in information content, similar to language, and found that events in human-produced monophonic music tend to have information content close to conditional entropy, with analysis of how typical sampling affects information distribution.
It has been shown in a recent publication that words in human-produced English language tend to have an information content close to the conditional entropy. In this paper, we show that the same is true for events in human-produced monophonic musical sequences. We also show how "typical sampling" influences the distribution of information around the entropy for single events and sequences.