On the emergence of Zipf's law in music

BILLONI, ORLANDO V.; JUAN I. PEROTTI

Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Conferencia; StatPhys-27 (2019); 2019

In this work we introduce a comparative statistical analysis of musical scores and literary texts, with the idea of introducing a general frame to validate a natural election of Zipfian units in music. We found that Zipf´s law emerges in music when chords and notes are chosen as Zipfian units, since both Heaps´ and Zipf´s law hold. Our results are supported by a consistent analysis of the statistical properties of music and texts, supporting the general validity of Zipf´s law in human languages. Moreover, our framework can be adapted to the study of the emergence of Zipf´s law in other natural phenomena.