Evidence map›Paper›PMID 35173194›Full record

ArticleScientific reports2022

Lognormals, power laws and double power laws in the distribution of frequencies of harmonic codewords from classical music.

Marc Serra-Peralta, Joan Serrà, Álvaro Corral

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Scientific reports, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
2citing papers in PubMed
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

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Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

2 citing papers in PubMed.

  1. Article
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4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

3 authors.

Marc Serra-PeraltaCentre de Recerca Matemàtica, Edifici C, Campus Bellaterra, 08193, Barcelona, Spain.
Joan SerràDolby Laboratories, 08018, Barcelona, Spain.
Álvaro CorralCentre de Recerca Matemàtica, Edifici C, Campus Bellaterra, 08193, Barcelona, Spain. alvaro.corral@uab.es.

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Zipf's law is a paradigm describing the importance of different elements in communication systems, especially in linguistics. Despite the complexity of the hierarchical structure of language, music has in some sense an even more complex structure, due to its multidimensional character (melody, harmony, rhythm, timbre, etc.). Thus, the relevance of Zipf's law in music is still an open question. Using discrete codewords representing harmonic content obtained from a large-scale analysis of classical composers, we show that a nearly universal Zipf-like law holds at a qualitative level. However, in an in-depth quantitative analysis, where we introduce the double power-law distribution as a new player in the classical debate between the superiority of Zipf's (power) law and that of the lognormal distribution, we conclude not only that universality does not hold, but also that there is not a unique probability distribution that best describes the usage of the different codewords by each composer.

Identifiers

PMID35173194
PMCPMC8850585

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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.