The Kolmogorov Complexity of Irish traditional dance music

TL;DR

This paper estimates the Kolmogorov complexity of Irish traditional dance music melodies using compression techniques, providing insights into their structural complexity and differences between tune categories.

Contribution

It introduces a method to quantify the complexity of Irish tunes via Lempel-Ziv compression, aiding in distinguishing simple and complex melodies.

Findings

Reels tend to have higher complexity than jigs.

Repetition correlates with perceived simplicity of tunes.

Complexity estimation can assist music learning and categorization.

Abstract

We estimate the Kolmogorov complexity of melodies in Irish traditional dance music using Lempel-Ziv compression. The "tunes" of the music are presented in so-called "ABC notation" as simply a sequence of letters from an alphabet: We have no rhythmic variation, with all notes being of equal length. Our estimation of algorithmic complexity can be used to distinguish "simple" or "easy" tunes (with more repetition) from "difficult" ones (with less repetition) which should prove useful for students learning tunes. We further present a comparison of two tune categories (reels and jigs) in terms of their complexity.