Discoveries

February 14, 2024

Genius Behind Sound

Listen to Today's Edition

Johann Sebastian Bach is held as one of the greatest composers of Western classical music that ever lived. Now, scientists say they know why, New Scientist reported.

That conclusion came about after researcher Suman Kulkarni and her colleagues wanted to understand how the ability to recall or anticipate a musical piece relates to its structure.

For their study, they used information theory to analyze Bach’s extensive repertoire, including religious hymns and fast-paced toccatas.

They transformed each musical piece into an information network, where notes became nodes and transitions between them formed edges. By quantifying the information in each composition, researchers discovered that Bach’s lively toccatas – designed for entertainment – contained more complexity than the meditative chorales crafted for religious settings.

The team then used the data to explore how listeners perceive Bach’s music. They started with a computer model based on experiments with images, measuring how surprising elements were. They then adapted this model to music, with links representing how likely listeners thought two notes would play in sequence.

They found that the network didn’t perfectly match listeners’ presumed note changes, suggesting human perception isn’t flawless. Despite this, the mismatch was low, indicating Bach’s music effectively conveys information.

Kulkarni aims to refine this model further by incorporating real brain scans to bridge the gap between musical complexity and neural responses.

Yet, challenges persist. Factors like listening duration and musical training must be considered, and information theory hasn’t yet unveiled whether Bach’s style is truly exceptional compared with other genres.

“I would love to perform the same analysis for different composers and non-Western music,” said Kulkarni.

This story originally appeared in the February 14, 2024 newsletter, Warm and Fuzzy Politics.