Symbolic dynamics of music from Europe and Japan

Abstract

After a brief introduction to the theory underlying block-entropy and its relation to the dynamics of complex systems as well as certain information theory aspects, we study musical texts coming from two distinct musical traditions, Japanese and Western European, encoded via symbolic dynamics. We quantify their information content, also known as the degree of "non-randomness"which essentially defines the complexity of the text. We analyze the departure of "total randomness"to the constraints underlying the dynamics of the symbol generating process. Following Shannon on his attribution of these constraints as the key factors of the emergence of complexity, we observe that it can be accurately assessed by the texts' block-entropy vs block-length scaling laws.