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A Statistical Approach to the Global Structure of John Cage’s Number Piece \({Five}^5\)

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 9110))

Abstract

The Number Pieces are a body of late works composed by John Cage using particular temporal structures called time-brackets. In a Number Piece with multiple performers, the superposition of the various parts, each containing time-brackets, creates an everchanging polyphonic work whose structure cannot be determined in advance. We provide here a statistical study of the global structure of the Number Piece \(Five^5\) in terms of probabilities of occurence of the various possible set classes, completed by the use of various measures from information theory.

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Correspondence to Alexandre Popoff .

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Popoff, A. (2015). A Statistical Approach to the Global Structure of John Cage’s Number Piece \({Five}^5\) . In: Collins, T., Meredith, D., Volk, A. (eds) Mathematics and Computation in Music. MCM 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9110. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20603-5_24

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20603-5_24

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-20602-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-20603-5

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