Abstract:Zipf's law is a paradigm describing the importance of different elements in communication systems, especially in linguistics. Despite the complexity of the hierarchical structure of language, music has in some sense an even more complex structure, due to its multidimensional character (melody, harmony, rhythm, timbre...). Thus, the relevance of Zipf's law in music is still an open question. Using discrete codewords representing harmonic content obtained from a large-scale analysis of classical composers, we sh… Show more
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