Expectancy-Violation and Information-Theoretic Models of Melodic Complexity

Eerola, T.

doi:10.18061/emr.v11i1.4836

Expectancy-Violation and Information-Theoretic Models of Melodic Complexity

Eerola, T.

Authors

Professor Tuomas Eerola tuomas.eerola@durham.ac.uk
Professor

Abstract

The present study assesses two types of models for melodic complexity: one based on expectancy violations and the other one related to an information-theoretic account of redundancy in music. Seven different datasets spanning artificial sequences, folk and pop songs were used to refine and assess the models. The refinement eliminated unnecessary components from both types of models. The final analysis pitted three variants of the two model types against each other and could explain from 46-74% of the variance in the ratings across the datasets. The most parsimonious models were identified with an information-theoretic criterion. This suggested that the simplified expectancy-violation models were the most efficient for these sets of data. However, the differences between all optimised models were subtle in terms both of performance and simplicity.

Citation

Eerola, T. (2016). Expectancy-Violation and Information-Theoretic Models of Melodic Complexity. Empirical Musicology Review, 11(1), 2-17. https://doi.org/10.18061/emr.v11i1.4836

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Oct 15, 2015
Online Publication Date	Jul 8, 2016
Publication Date	Jul 8, 2016
Deposit Date	Jun 7, 2016
Publicly Available Date	Jun 7, 2016
Journal	Empirical Musicology Review
Publisher	The Ohio State University
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	11
Issue	1
Pages	2-17
DOI	https://doi.org/10.18061/emr.v11i1.4836