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Re: [MUSIC-IR] Re: musical complexity



On 11/08/2011 2:20 PM, Justin London wrote:
I'd also add that accounting for the number, variety, and distribution of elements in a sequence may not capture all of its complexities, for some aspects of musical complexity are not in the acoustic signal.

There's also a well-known distinction between "complexity" and "complicatedness." When things are "complex" many things are perceptually connected and big pictures emerge, whereas when things are complicated there's many things that
don't cohere into any picture at all.

Lerdahl e.g. claimed that a Mozart piano concerto is more "complex" than "Marteau sans Maitre". More generally, one should be able to distinguish between things that are probably going to wind up
sounding like music & things that probably won't.

To get a sense of how hard that problem is, consider "Happy Birthday" forwards & backwards. Should not the metric report that the forward version is more complex than the backwards?

-- eliot