title: Bach Is the Father of Harmony: Revealed by a 1/f Fluctuation Analysis across Musical Genres.
abstract: Harmony is a fundamental attribute of music. Close connections exist between music and mathematics since both pursue harmony and unity. In music, the consonance of notes played simultaneously partly determines our perception of harmony; associates with aesthetic responses; and influences the emotion expression. The consonance could be considered as a window to understand and analyze harmony. Here for the first time we used a 1/f fluctuation analysis to investigate whether the consonance fluctuation structure in music with a wide range of composers and genres followed the scale free pattern that has been found for pitch, melody, rhythm, human body movements, brain activity, natural images and geographical features. We then used a network graph approach to investigate which composers were the most influential both within and across genres. Our results showed that patterns of consonance in music did follow scale-free characteristics, suggesting that this feature is a universally evolved one in both music and the living world. Furthermore, our network analysis revealed that Bach's harmony patterns were having the most influence on those used by other composers, followed closely by Mozart.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Engineering, School of Computer and Information Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing, China.|Key Laboratory for NeuroInformation of Ministry of Education, School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China.
authors.forename: Dan
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory for NeuroInformation of Ministry of Education, School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China.
authors.forename: Keith M
authors.initials: KM
authors.lastname: Kendrick
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, McGill University, Montreal, Canada.
authors.forename: Daniel J
authors.initials: DJ
authors.lastname: Levitin
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory for NeuroInformation of Ministry of Education, School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China.|Center for Life Sciences, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China.
authors.forename: Chaoyi
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory for NeuroInformation of Ministry of Education, School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China.
authors.forename: Dezhong
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Yao
mesh_terms: D001307:Auditory Perception; D005197:Famous Persons; D049669:History, 16th Century; D049670:History, 17th Century; D049671:History, 18th Century; D049672:History, 19th Century; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D009146:Music / Q000266:history*