Markov Chain Analysis of Musical Dice Games

Abstract

We have studied entropy, redundancy, complexity, and first passage times to notes for 804 pieces of 29 composers. The successful understanding of tonal music calls for an experienced listener, as entropy dominates over redundancy in musical messages. First passage times to notes resolve tonality and feature a composer. We also discuss the possible distances in space of musical dice games and introduced the geodesic distance based on the Riemann structure associated to the probability vectors (rows of the transition matrices).