Digging Into Questions About Entropy

Here's a graph that represents two things. First, a lot of work completed. Second, a lot of work that needs to be done!

These three curves are the bits of entropy per sliding window location in a work by Buxtehude (Prelude and Fugue in G Minor). The width of the window is set by the Kemeny constant of the MIDI track. There are three tracks: Swell, Great, and Pedal. 

On a pipe organ, the main manual (keyboard) is called the Great. It is usually the bottom manual on two-manual instruments, or the middle manual on three-manual instruments. The upper manual is called the Swell. The Pedal is usually the very lowest notes in the piece. This is often played with the feet on the pedalboard. 

Each of these tracks represents the music that would be played on the corresponding part of the instrument. Each part can be voiced on a completely separate rank of pipes, creating a layered sound. 

In the MIDI version, each of the tracks is examined mathematically. First, a Markov chain is derived. This is a table that shows how likely it is for any particular note to follow a particular note. Starting with the first note and going all the way to the end, all combinations of the notes that follow the previous note are recorded, and then the probabilities calculated.

Next, the Kemeny Constant is found. This is the number of steps from a starting note to a randomly selected note chosen from the Markov chain's stationary distribution. No matter which starting note is selected from the piece, it takes about the same amount of steps to reach the randomly selected note from the piece. This number of steps is the width of our sliding window. The window function slides over the track. For each window, the entropy of the windowed sample is measured.

What we're looking for is places where the entropy changes dramatically. This would potentially indicate a local change in the entropy of the piece, which may indicate a compositional change or transition in the work. Identifying macro-phrases like this may be helpful in constructing algorithmic compositions that better emulate human composition. 

As you can tell from the graph, the tracks do not line up. The pedal track is much shorter than the great, which is shorter than the swell. Therefore, the number of windows evaluated is not the same across the three tracks. This means that the samples are not aligned in time if they are simply listed along the horizontal axis. The samples need to be normalized for observed time. This (using the timestamps in the MIDI file to align the samples) is the next task in the design of this part of the software.