Abstract :
Statistical properties of music and their development since about 1500 have been studied; e.g. the properties of frequency distributions of pitch and duration of tones, of intervals of consecutive tones, correlograms of various parameters up to distances of 30 of these parameters, matrices of transition probabilities of various parameters. In the period considered here the variance of the frequency distributions of pitch grows from 3 to 13 and the mean value of the kurtosis of the intervals of consecutive tones grows from 5 to 15 and splits up in recent times into two distinct values (15 and 6, 5).
