A Similarity Network for Correlating Musical Structure to Military Strategy

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel network-based approach to analyze the similarities between musical structure and military strategy, using MFCCs to create Music Clips Correlation Networks for various soundtracks.

Contribution

It develops the MCCN model to relate music perception to military tactics, providing an interdisciplinary framework linking music analysis with military strategy and management.

Findings

Identifies similarities between musical structure and military tactics.

Demonstrates the applicability of network analysis to music perception.

Suggests new perspectives for aesthetic education and technology-art relationships.

Abstract

Music perception, a multi-sensory process based on the synesthesia effect, is an essential component of music aesthetic education. Understanding music structure helps both perception and aesthetic education. Music structure incorporates a range of information, the coordination of which forms the melody, just as different military actions cooperate to produce a military strategy. However, there are a few ways for assessing music perception from the perspectives of system operation and information management. In this paper, we explore the similarities between music structure and military strategy while creating the Music Clips Correlation Network (MCCN) based on Mel-frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs). The inspiration comes from the comparison between a concert conductor's musical score and a military war commander's sand table exercise. Specifically, we create MCCNs for various kinds of war movie soundtracks, then relate military tactics (Sun Tzu's Art of War, etc.) and political institutions to military operations networks. Our primary findings suggest a few similarities, implying that music perception and aesthetic education can be approached from a military strategy and management perspective through this interdisciplinary research. Similarly, we can discover similarities between the art of military scheming and the art of musical structure based on network analysis in order to facilitate the understanding of the relationship between technology and art.