PMO Zone Blog

Statistical Symphony Analysis

I found an interesting analysis of Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony. Unlike most analysis this one tries to view each note in mathematical terms and then decide how the piece behaves by tracing the prominence of each sections notes.  The idea was to see if you could see the structure of the piece in the notes that were most often played.

Its an interesting idea and I hope they pursue it more.  I think they are going to have to go beyond simply counting the notes and get into tracing cord structures. Even then it may be hard to find a good balance because so much of the music in a given key only lightly touches the root and spends most of the time dancing around it.