Complexity and the Structure of Music II: Universal Features and Evolutionary Perspectives Across Cultures

Meeting Summary:  The abstraction of musical structures (notes, melodies, chords, harmonic or rhythmic progressions, etc.) as mathematical objects in a geometrical space is one of the great accomplishments of contemporary music theory. Building on this foundation, the goal of this working group is to generalize the concept of musical spaces as networks and derive functional principles of compositional form by the direct analysis of the network topology. The introduction of a well-defined metric provides a novel framework for the quantification of musical “rules” as emergent behaviors in a complex network and the analysis and quantification of similarity of musical objects and structures. This approach suggests a way to relate such measures to the human perception of different musical entities and explores whether these entities share universal characters across time and cultures. In a more traditional musicological approach, the analysis of a single work or a corpus of compositions as complex networks provides alternative ways of interpreting the compositional process of a composer by quantifying emergent behaviors with well-established statistical mechanics techniques. Finally, the knowledge acquired by this comprehensive analysis of musical spaces can be clearly generalized for the generation of algorithmically based music composition agents.