The Checkerboard of Tunes



Crompton, AP ORCID: 0000-0001-9206-8341
(2018) The Checkerboard of Tunes. In: Bridges 2018, 2018-7-24 - 2018-7-29, Stockholm.

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Abstract

A physical model was made of all the tunes in Deny Parsons’ Directory of Tunes. The Directory encodes tunes as a sequence of the letters, U, R, or D, according to whether the notes go up, repeat, or go down, with respect to the previous note. If we substitute +1, 0, -1 for U, R, D respectively, then let the Parsons number, S(n), be their sum up to the nth note. When the number of tunes with particular values of S for n = 1, 2, ...16, were counted for all the tunes in the Directory the results, seen in model form, showed a surprising checkerboard pattern. It is argued that the checkerboard is musically significant and arises because the distribution of repeating notes in tunes is non-random.

Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item (Unspecified)
Depositing User: Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited: 31 Jul 2018 09:07
Last Modified: 19 Jan 2023 01:29
URI: https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3024403