"Math rock" may be a pretentious, eye roll-inducing moniker critics and ostentatious musicians alike use to describe wonky and occasionally awesome music, but a new study suggests the term might be more on key than we thought. Literally.
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Led by neurologists Daniel Levitin of McGill University and Vino Menon of Stanford, a team of researchers analyzed nearly 2,000 musical compositions by more than 40 composers over the last 400 years. The verdict? They discovered a mathematical formula for rhythm.
"One of the things that we’ve known about music for a couple of decades is that the distribution of pitches and loudness in music follow predictable mathematical patterns," said Levitin in press release.
In the large swath of Western musical genres the researchers studied, they found that all compositions adhered to the same "fractal" quality. Basically, this means that larger structures of musical pieces are formed by repeating themes of the composition's short-term structure.
All that talk of "structure" kind of sounds like the antithesis to the serendipity we normally associate with music creation, right? Don't worry aspiring musicians, the researchers also found that each composer had their own distinctive flare when it came to rhythmic time signatures.
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"This was one of the most unanticipated and exciting findings of our research," said Levitin. "Mozart's notated rhythms were the least predictable, Beethoven's were the most, and Monteverdi and Joplin had nearly identical, overlapping rhythm distributions. But they each have their own distinctive rhythmic signature that you can capture. Our findings also suggest that rhythm may play an even greater role than pitch in conveying a composer’s distinctive style."
[Via Futurity]
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