Music, emotion and Zipf’s law
Summary :
Table of Contents
- Quantitative linguistics
- Frequency distributions
- Entropy
- Previous research
- Balancing effort
- Data types
- Corpus size
- Music and Zipf 's law
- Music and communication
- Music and emotion
- Research question
- Experimental setup
- Results
- The rank-frequency distribution of notes and intervals
- Single music compositions
- Discussion and conclusion
- Bibliography
Abstract
The hypothesis of zipf concerning a universal Principle of Least Effort, manifesting itself in zipf 's law and modeled by Ferrer i Cancho and Sol'e in a signal-object reference matrix, gave rise to the idea that maybe the elements
in music that elicit our emotional responses can be identified. The unde- niable relation between music and emotion was the reason to consider a possible signal-emotion reference system analogous to the signal-object ref- erence in natural human language. Following zipf 's line of reasoning, music
as an exponent of human behaviour is subject to the Principle of Least Effort and is consequently structured in such a way that the distribution pattern
of the signals that "communicate the musical message" follows a power law.
In this thesis the possibility to deploy the characteristics of the zipf curve to gain more insight into the relation between music and emotion was investi- gated. From the elements that, viewed in the framework of a signal-emotion reference could qualify as the signals that elicit emotion, two were investi- gated, viz. notes and intervals. Experiments were performed on 18 single classical music pieces from 18 different composers and on a larger classical music corpus. Results indicate that intervals have a distribution pattern that comes closest to a zipf curve, but neither data type exhibits a gen- uine zipf distribution. Further research will be needed to decide whether the method that was applied could be a useful tool in the search for the elements that elicit emotion.
in music that elicit our emotional responses can be identified. The unde- niable relation between music and emotion was the reason to consider a possible signal-emotion reference system analogous to the signal-object ref- erence in natural human language. Following zipf 's line of reasoning, music
as an exponent of human behaviour is subject to the Principle of Least Effort and is consequently structured in such a way that the distribution pattern
of the signals that "communicate the musical message" follows a power law.
In this thesis the possibility to deploy the characteristics of the zipf curve to gain more insight into the relation between music and emotion was investi- gated. From the elements that, viewed in the framework of a signal-emotion reference could qualify as the signals that elicit emotion, two were investi- gated, viz. notes and intervals. Experiments were performed on 18 single classical music pieces from 18 different composers and on a larger classical music corpus. Results indicate that intervals have a distribution pattern that comes closest to a zipf curve, but neither data type exhibits a gen- uine zipf distribution. Further research will be needed to decide whether the method that was applied could be a useful tool in the search for the elements that elicit emotion.
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