On Measuring the Complexity of Musical Rhythm

This paper describes preliminary results of a research project on the development of mathematical measures of the complexity of musical rhythms represented as strings of symbols denoting sounded and silent pulses. Two mathematical measures founded on symbolic sequences are compared with measures based on acoustic features, and both are compared with human judgments obtained from listening experiments with a dataset of Middle-Eastern rhythms. The results to date suggest that, in spite of limited success, finding a mathematical measure that accurately predicts human judgments of rhythm complexity based on either purely symbolic or acoustic features, remains a challenging open problem.

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