{"id":16871,"date":"2024-08-08T12:12:04","date_gmt":"2024-08-08T12:12:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scienmag.com\/the-structure-of-sound-network-insights-into-bachs-music\/"},"modified":"2024-08-08T12:12:04","modified_gmt":"2024-08-08T12:12:04","slug":"the-structure-of-sound-network-insights-into-bachs-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienmag.com\/the-structure-of-sound-network-insights-into-bachs-music\/","title":{"rendered":"The structure of sound: network insights into Bach\u2019s music"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Even today, centuries after he lived, Johann Sebastian Bach remains one of the world\u2019s most popular composers. On Spotify, close to seven million people stream his music per month, and his listener count is higher than that of Mozart and even Beethoven. The Pr\u00e9lude to his Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major has been listened to hundreds of millions of times.<\/p>\n

What makes Bach\u2019s music so enduring? Music critics might point to his innovative harmonies, complex use of counterpoint and symmetrical compositions. Represent Bach\u2019s music as a network, however, where each node stands for one musical note, and each edge the transition from one note to another, and a wholly different picture emerges.<\/p>\n

In a\u00a0recent paper in\u00a0Physical Review Research<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0Dani S. Bassett<\/a>, J. Peter Skirkanich Professor in Bioengineering and in Electrical and Systems Engineering within the School of Engineering and Applied Science, in Physics & Astronomy within the School of Arts & Sciences, and in Neurology and Psychiatry within the Perelman School of Medicine, and\u00a0Suman Kulkarni<\/a>, a doctoral student in Physics & Astronomy, applied network theory to Bach\u2019s entire oeuvre.<\/p>\n

The paper sheds new light on the unique qualities of Bach\u2019s music and demonstrates the potential for analyzing music through the lens of networks. Such analysis could yield benefits for music therapists, musicians, composers and music producers, by giving them unprecedented quantitative insight into the structure of different musical compositions.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis paper provides a starting point for how one can boil down these complexities in music and start with a simple representation to dig into how these pieces are structured,\u201d says Kulkarni, the paper\u2019s lead author. \u201cWe applied this framework to a dozen types of Bach\u2019s compositions and were able to observe quantitative differences in how they were structured.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2020,\u00a0Christopher Lynn<\/a>, Assistant Professor in Physics at Yale, then a doctoral student in Bassett\u2019s Complex Systems Lab,\u00a0developed a framework with Bassett<\/a>\u00a0for analyzing the information contained in complex networks that takes into account how humans perceive that information. In addition to posts on Facebook and work by Shakespeare, Lynn, who also co-authored the new paper, applied the framework to five pieces of classical music, including one by Bach.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was really interesting just to see how our model helped us to understand the structure of those pieces,\u201d says Bassett. \u201cFrom there we realized if we really wanted to say something meaningful about music more generally, you can’t use a handful of pieces. You need to use a large data set.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fortunately, Bach composed more than 1100 extant works, roughly a third of which Kulkarni, Bassett, Lynn and\u00a0Sophia David<\/a>, a Yale undergraduate and additional coauthor, reinterpreted as networks of notes and the transitions between them. \u201cWe hear one note and then the next and the next and the next,\u201d explains Bassett. \u201cSo a song is just a sequence of pieces of information.\u201d<\/p>\n

Two of the most crucial measures the researchers found that characterize music networks are entropy, or the level of variation in note sequences in the networks, and the degree of clustering. Networks with higher entropy, in which any given node connects to many more other nodes, contain more information, while those with lower entropy contain less information. The degree of clustering relates the extent to which the network\u2019s content subverts audience expectations: more clusters means the network matches expectations, while low clustering means the network deviates from expectations.<\/p>\n

\u201cLanguage networks have very high entropy,\u201d Bassett says. \u201cSo they are very complex \u2014 they\u2019re packing in a lot of information, but they have low divergence from our expectations. And music is sort of the opposite. It has less entropy, less complexity in general, but frequently diverges from our expectations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Equipped with this framework for quantifying musical structure, future research can explore the relationship between different musical structures and listeners\u2019 brain activity. \u201cIf we understand how one person responds to different levels of complexity in a piece,\u201d Bassett points out, \u201cthat may help us guide the kinds of music that we recommend for a particular therapy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Composers, producers and services like Spotify might also benefit from understanding how different musical structures affect the brain. The researchers found that Bach\u2019s chorales have much lower entropy than his toccatas, pointing to a difference not just in style \u2014 chorales are simple and repetitive, while the toccatas have complex, chromatic passages \u2014 but also in purpose: sung in church, chorales are meant to spur meditation and adoration, while toccatas are designed for entertainment.<\/p>\n

For her part, Kulkarni looks forward to applying this framework to additional genres and composers; soon, the researchers will follow up by analyzing jazz music in a similar fashion. \u201cI’m very curious about non-Western music and I wonder what sorts of differences we’ll see across these different cultural traditions,\u201d Kulkarni says.<\/p>\n

Bassett, who once trained as a classical pianist before switching to science after suffering stress fractures in their forearms, hopes to further explore the relationship between music and language networks. \u201cI would really like to understand what’s special and different between these two ways that we communicate with one another and impact our collective affective states.\u201d<\/p>\n

This study was conducted at the University of Pennsylvania\u2019s School of Engineering and Applied Science, School of Arts and Sciences, and Perelman School of Medicine; Yale University; City University of New York; and Princeton University and was supported by the\u00a0<\/em>Center for Curiosity<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Even today, centuries after he lived, Johann Sebastian Bach remains one of the world\u2019s most popular composers. On Spotify, close to seven million people stream his music per month, and his listener count is higher than that of Mozart and even Beethoven. The Pr\u00e9lude to his Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major has been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16872,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16871","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology-and-engineering"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/scienmag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/The-structure-of-sound-network-insights-into-Bachs-music.png","jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16871","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16871"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/scienmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16871\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} Science

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