Numerical Tools for Describing Musical Compositions

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to apply the methodologies of statistical mechanics to develop flexible tools for use in computational musicology. Classical statistical mechanics is the study of extremely information-rich particle systems. Large quantities of information describing the position and velocity of each particle may be compressed into a few descriptive variables such as temperature and pressure. These variables are easily perceived by an observer. In the same way, we will distill information from the scores of musical compositions, producing new macroscopic quantities that describe perceptible features of the music.