On the Typicality of Musical Sequences

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that human-produced musical sequences exhibit information content close to their entropy, similar to language, and explores how typical sampling affects information distribution in music.

Contribution

It extends the concept of typicality from language to music and analyzes the impact of typical sampling on information distribution in musical sequences.

Findings

Musical events have information content close to entropy.

Typical sampling influences information distribution in music.

The study bridges language and music in information theory.

Abstract

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.