The beat goes on: the geometry that makes music pleasing | Faculty of Science - McGill University

The beat goes on: the geometry that makes music pleasing | Faculty of Science - McGill University: The researchers found that all the musical compositions they studied shared the same "fractal" quality, where the part is a more limited repetition of the whole. That is the larger temporal structure of well-formed musical pieces is composed of repeating motifs of their own short-term temporal structure.  At the same time, researchers also discovered that each composer had his or her own highly individual rhythmic signature. “This was one of the most unanticipated and exciting findings of our research,” asserts Levitin. “Mozart's notated rhythms were the least predictable, Beethoven's were the most, and Monteverdi and Joplin had nearly identical, overlapping rhythm distributions. But they each have their own distinctive rhythmic signature that you can capture.