INFORMATION CONTENT IN MELODIC AND NON-MELODIC LINES

Ben Duane
Northwestern University

ABSTRACT
Although melodies seem to be focal points for attentionfigures to
the grounds created by other musical lineslittle is known about
why this is so. This paper tests the hypothesis that melodies mark
themselves for attention partly by being less predictable than the
lines that accompany them. As in several previous studies,
predictability is quantified using various types of information
entropy. These entropies are computed for melodic and
non-melodic lines extracted from two musical corporaone
containing rock songs, the other containing Baroque keyboard
minuets. Results show that the various entropies not only are
significantly higher in melodies than in non-melodies, but can be
used to classify lines as melodic or non-melodic with above-chance
accuracy.

1.

INTRODUCTION

Melodies, more than other musical lines, seem to attract listeners

attentionto occupy the foreground of their perception. Indeed,
the whole concept of melody is often explained using the
figure-ground metaphor. Melodies are not just coherent series of
notes, they are principal. They stand apart from their
accompaniments, like faces from the backgrounds of portraits, and
place themselves under the listeners notice.

Figure 1 Boccherini, string quartet, op. 11, no. 5, mm. 1-4.

When listening to Figure 1, for instance, ones attention is drawn
more to the melodic line of the Violin 1 than to the non-melodic
lines of the other four parts. It is for this reason, I suspect, that
Boccherinis minuet can be identified easily by the first violins line
but not by one of the other four. For someone who did not know the
piece by name, it would make perfect sense to refer to the quintet
whose melody goes:

But not the quintet with that cello line:

The Violin 1 melody is a signature of sortsa feature by which the

piece can be instantly recognizedand it could hardly function this
way without being a focal point of the listeners attention.
This much is almost common sense. Most of us realize, at least
intuitively, that melodies are uniquely marked for attention. But
what marks them? What about melodies makes them stand out,
attract attention, acquire principality? One possibility is that our
attention is drawn not to the melody per se but to the top of the
texture, since the melody is usually the highest line present. This,
however, does not explain excerpts like the Boccherini, in which
the non-melodic Violin 2 and Viola are often above the melodic
Violin 1. The effect might also be due not to the melody but its
performance. One might, in other words, attend to Figure 1s first
violin part because the first violinist brings it out. But how would
he or she know to do this? First violinists cannot count on always
having the melody. No, it must be something about the line itself,
not how it is played or orchestrated, that designates it as melody and
prompts the listener to attend to it.
That something, which marks melodies for attention, might be
partly their predictabilityor lack thereof. In Figure 1, the Violin 1
line is, in every apparent way, less predictable than the other four.
This line features nothing as pervasive and uniform as the second
violins Es, the violas eighth notes, the first cellos thirds, or the
second cellos articulations. The melody is simply the least
predictable, most interesting line in this example. And so it is in
many other examples from many other musical styles. Countless
accompanimental patterns, from the Alberti bass to the oompah
bass, are more predictable than the melodies they are paired with.
Perhaps, then, the lower predictability of melodies is operativea
feature that somehow directs our attention toward them.
This hypothesis is tested here. Like several previous authors, I
quantify the predictability of musical lines using different types of
information entropy. These quantities are calculated across two
musical corpora, each containing one melodic line and one
non-melodic line. The results suggest that melodies indeed tend to
be less predictable than non-melodies, meaning that this lower
predictability might mark them for attention.

2.

RELATED RESEARCH

Madsen and Widmer (2006) tested essentially the same hypothesis

as this paperthat listeners tend to focus on the most complex
(least repetitive) voice, experiencing this as foreground (p. 1812).
Like me, these authors quantify complexity using different types of
information entropy, but their work differs from mine on two

counts. First, they compute some types of entropy that I do not, and
vice-versa. (They do not compute the sub-phrase entropy described
in section 3.4, for instance.) Second, their data comprise one
symphony and one concerto, whereas mine include a corpus of
minuets and a corpus of rock songs.

unfortunate quirk of standard terminology.) Equation 2 is

conceived as a mean of the information, I(xi), across all possible
events xi, weighted by the respective probabilities, p(xi). As such,
this mean estimates the expected information of each event in the
signal or, in another sense, each events average surprisal.

Although psychologists have not, to my knowledge, studied why

melodies attract attention, they have researched musical attention
from other angles. Davison and Banks (2003) had subjects listen to
two-voice counterpoint, instructing them to attend to one of the
voices, and found that their perception of the voice attended to was
affected by the structure of the voice ignored. Dowling, Lung, and
Herrbold (1987) found that if listeners are primed to expect notes in
certain pitch regions, and at certain times, they often direct their
attention accordingly. And Bigand, McAdams, and Fort (2000)
tested two competing models of musical attention: a divided
attention model, in which listeners concurrently attend to multiple
lines; and a figure-ground model, in which listeners attend to just
one part at a time. The authors results, however, did not fully
support either hypothesis, leading them to propose a third,
integrative model, by which listeners switch their attention
between one voice at a time and all voices at once.

Say, for example, that the signal is a series of coin flips. The
alphabet of possible events would be X = {heads, tails}, and the
first-order entropy of the signal would be:

Several researchers have applied information theory to the study of

music. Meyer (1967a, 1967b) discussed connections between
information theory and musical meaning and aesthetics. Other
authors have tried to use information entropy as a metric of musical
style (Youngblood 1958, Knopoff and Hutchinson 1983, Snyder
1990, Margulis and Beatty 2008). Hiller (1967) performed an
information-theoretic analysis on Weberns Symphonie, op. 21.
And Knopoff and Hutchinson (1981) proposed a method for
computing information-theoretic quantities for musical continua.
None of this research, however, attempted to use entropy to predict
whether lines are melodic or not.

where p(xi) is the probability of event xi and pi(xj) is the probability

of event xj given that event xi has just occurred. Equation 4 could be
rewritten as:

3.
3.1

QUANTIFYING PREDICTABILTY
First- and Second-Order Entropy

The central premise of information theory is, of course, that

information and predictability are inversely relatedthat the
unexpected is also the most informative. Mathematically, this
means that as probability decreases, information increases or, more
specifically, that the information, I(x), of some event x is given by
Equation 1:

I x log 2 p x

H1 p heads log 2 p heads p tails log 2 p tails (3)

If the coin was fair, and p(heads) = p(tails) = 0.5, the entropy would
be H(1) = 1. But if the coin was riggedsay with p(heads) = 0.75
and p(tails) = 0.25then the entropy would be H(1) = 0.81. Entropy
is lower with the rigged coin because that coin is more predictable:
most of the time, it will turn up heads, whereas the first coins
distribution is half-and-half.
Second-order entropy is computed using first-order transition
probabilitiesthat is, the probabilities of observing certain events,
given the events directly preceding them. The formula is:

H 2 i 1 p xi j 1 pi x j log 2 pi x j
n

H 2 i 1 p xi H 1 xi
n

(4)

(5)

where H(1)(xi) is the first-order entropy of the signal, given that xi

was the most recent event. Second-order entropy, then, is a mean of
the first-order entropies H(1)(xi) for each prior event xi, weighted by
the probabilities p(xi) of these events.

3.2

Pitch Entropy

In what follows, pitch entropy is defined using the alphabet of

possible melodic intervals X = {leap up, step up, unison, step down,
leap down}. To compute this entropy for a given line, each interval
is placed into one of the categories in X, as illustrated in Figure 2.
Each intervals probability, p(x) for each xX, is estimated by
counting that intervals instantiations. The lines entropy is then
calculated from these probabilities.

(1)

where p(x) is the probability of x.

Entropy, then, is the average information of each event in a signal
(i.e. a series of events). The first-order entropy, H(1), of a signal is
defined as:
H 1 i 1 p xi I xi
n

(2)

i 1 p xi log 2 p xi
n

where n is the number of possible events xi. (That first-order

entropy derives from zeroth-order Markov probability is an

Figure 2 Vocal line from She Loves You by the Beatles.

We could, of course, expand the alphabet of intervals. The leap up
category, for instance, could distinguish between thirds, fourths,
fifths, and so on. But larger alphabets can become too large for the
relatively short signals found in music. If an alphabet contains n
intervals, then as n increases, so does the likelihood that some
intervals will be absent from a given musical line. Such absences
become even more likely with the n2 possible pairs of intervals

reflected by second-order entropy. And, when many possibilities

are not represented, entropy seems to become less effective in
distinguishing musical signals. The size of the interval alphabet is
kept low for this reason.

3.3

Rhythmic Entropy

Entropy is also computed with respect to rhythmic durations. For

each note in the line under analysis, the following value is obtained
(see Figure 2):

b round log 2 b

(6)

where b is the number of beats the note occupies, and round{}

returns the integer nearest . Rhythmic entropy, then, is defined
using the alphabet X = {b < 3, b = 3, b = 2, b = 1, b = 0, b =
1, b = 2, b = 3, b > 3}. This definition serves the dual purpose of
transforming rhythmic duration from a continuous to a discrete
variable, which makes entropy simpler to calculate, and limiting the
number of possibilities, for the reason discussed in section 3.2.

3.4

Entropy of Sub-Phrases

We seem, as listeners, to process melodies and other lines not only

as complete units but also as series of shorter segments. (The
melody in Figure 2, for example, is easily heard as the segments
shown beneath the staff.) It is plausible, therefore, that computing
the entropy of such segments, rather than of full lines, would be
usefulthat it would tap into some key aspect of music perception
that we would otherwise overlook. I obtained such quantities for the
analysis reported below. Melodies and other lines were
automatically segmented into sub-phrases, using an algorithm
proposed by Cambouropoulos (1997), and then entropy was
computed for these sub-phrases.

4.

MUSICAL CORPORA

To assess whether melodic lines are in fact less predictable than

non-melodic lines, two corpora of music were assembled. Two
linesone melodic, the other non-melodicwere extracted from
each musical work. For each line, six varieties of entropy were
computed: first- and second-order pitch and rhythmic entropy for
the complete lines and first-order pitch and rhythmic entropy for
lines segmented into sub-phrases.
The first corpus included the nine two-part minuets from J. S.
Bachs Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach. In this case, the right
hand was considered melodic, the left hand non-melodic. The
second corpus comprised the first verse and chorus from thirteen
rock songs by The Beatles, Cream, Tom Petty, Billy Joel, and Elvis
Costello. For each song, I transcribed the vocal line, which was
considered melodic, and the bass line, which was considered
non-melodic.

5.

RESULTS

The data from each corpus were analyzed in two ways. Multivariate
analyses of variance and paired t-tests were used to compare the
entropies of melodic and non-melodic lines. And linear

discriminant analysis (LDA), quadratic discriminant analysis

(QDA), and logistic regression (LR) were employed to see how
well the six entropies could classify lines as melodic or
non-melodic. I tested classifiers using not only all six entropies
together, but also the other sixty-two possible subsets of these six.
Accuracy was defined as the percentage of pieces in the corpus that
were correctly classified, and statistical significance was evaluated
using a binomial test. The classifiers were tested using
cross-validation. For each piece, a classifier was trained on the
other members of the corpus, and this classifier was tested on the
withheld piece.
The results for the minuets are shown in Tables 1 and 2. A
MANOVA showed a significant difference in one dimension
between the entropies of the right and left hands (p = 0.01).
Follow-up t-tests showed that both second-order pitch entropy for
full lines and first-order pitch entropy for sub-phrases were
significantly higher in melodic than in non-melodic lines. None of
the other entropies produced significant differences. The LDA
classifier performed above chance when using all six entropies,
labeling the minuets with 83.33% accuracy (p < 0.01). Several
subsets of the six entropies increased the accuracy of all three
classifiers to 88.89% (p < 0.001).
RIGHT HAND
Mean St. Dev.
1.51
0.22

LEFT HAND
Mean St. Dev.
1.26
0.21

0.10

1st-order,
rhythmic

2.02

0.12

1.97

0.18

0.73

2nd-order,
pitch

1.11

0.15

0.85

0.15

0.01

2nd-order,
rhythmic

1.54

0.15

1.59

0.15

1.00

1st-order,
pitch,
sub-phrases

1.50

0.22

1.09

0.16

0.01

1st-order,
rhythmic,
sub-phrases

1.98

0.18

1.82

0.25

0.20

ENTROPY
st

1 -order,
pitch

P-VALUE

Table 1 Distributions of entropies for the minuets.

LDA

ALL SIX ENTROPIES

Accuracy p-value
83.33%
0.004

BEST SUBSET(S)
Accuracy p-value
88.89%
<0.001

QDA

55.56%

0.41

88.89%

<0.001

LR

61.11%

0.24

88.89%

<0.001

CLASSIFIER

Table 2 Classification accuracy for the minuets.

The results for the rock songs are shown in Tables 3 and 4. A
MANOVA revealed a significant difference in one dimension
between the entropies of the vocal and bass lines (p < 0.001).
According to individual t-tests, all entropies, except first-order

rhythmic for sub-phrases, were significantly higher in vocal lines

than bass lines. All three classifiers performed above chance when
using the six entropies. Each classifiers performance improved
with certain subsets of the entropies, with the LR model reaching
100% accuracy in one case.

based not on the musics structure but on empirical studies of

human subjects. And fourth, we might acknowledge the gray area
between melodies and non-melodies by examining countermelodies, bass lines, cadential punctuations, and the like.
Nonetheless, this studys results were strong, with many effects
being statistically significant. The connection hypothesized
between the predictability of lines and their roles as melodies or
non-melodiesmight thus be fundamental to both melodic
perception and musical attention. That this connection exists is
amply evident.

VOCAL LINE
Mean St. Dev.
1.85
0.29

BASS LINE
Mean St. Dev.
1.20
0.51

<0.01

1st-order,
rhythmic

2.11

0.15

1.78

0.48

0.01

2nd-order,
pitch

1.42

0.20

0.88

0.38

<0.001

Bigand, E., McAdams, S., & Foret, S. (2000). Divided attention in

music. International Journal of Psychology, 35(6), 270-278.

2nd-order,
rhythmic

1.67

0.16

1.34

0.43

0.01

1st-order,
pitch,
sub-phrases

1.46

0.26

1.10

0.54

0.04

Cambouropoulos, E. (1997). Musical rhythm: A formal model for

determining local boundaries, accents, and metre in a melodic
surface. In M. Leman (Ed.), Music, gestalt, and computing (pp.
277-293). Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

1st-order,
rhythmic,
sub-phrases

1.81

0.31

1.47

0.58

0.14

Davison, L. L., & Banks, W. P. (2003). Selective attention in

two-part counterpoint. Music Perception, 21(1), 3-20.

Table 3 Distributions of entropies for the rock songs.

Dowling, W. J., Lung, K. M.-T., & Herrbold, S. (1987). Aiming

attention in pitch and time in the perception of interleaved
melodies. Perception and Psychophysics, 41(6), 642-656.

ENTROPY
st

1 -order,
pitch

P-VALUE

7.

REFERENCES

LDA

ALL SIX ENTROPIES

Accuracy p-value
75%
<0.01

BEST SUBSET(S)
Accuracy p-value
85.71%
<0.0001

Hiller, L., & Fuller, R. (1967). Structure and Information in

Webern's Symphonie, Op. 21. Journal of Music Theory, 11(1),
60-115.

QDA

82.14%

<0.001

89.29%

<0.0001

Knopoff, L., & Hutchinson, W. (1981). Information theory for

musical continua. Journal of Music Theory, 25(1), 17-44.

LR

85.71%

<0.0001

100%

<0.0001

CLASSIFIER

Table 4 Classification accuracy for the rock songs.

6.

CONCLUSION

This paper reported evidence consistent with the hypothesis that

melodic lines are often less predictable than non-melodic lines and
are thereby marked for the listeners attention. Two corpora,
containing pieces with one melodic and one non-melodic line, were
assembled, and six types of information entropy were computed for
each line. Several of these entropies were significantly higher for
melodies than for non-melodies. The six entropies, moreover,
proved able to distinguish melodic from non-melodic lines with
above-chance accuracy. This accuracy even increased for some
subsets of the six entropies.
These results, of course, are provisional, and research like this
could stand at least four basic refinements. First, the predictability
of lines could be more thoroughly quantified, using additional types
of entropy and perhaps other values. Second, testing corpora could
be expanded in both size and stylistic diversity. Third, when
labeling the lines of these corpora as melodic or non-melodic, we
might take a more psychological approach, making these choices

Knopoff, L., & Hutchinson, W. (1983). Entropy as a measure of

style: The influence of sample length. Journal of Music
Theory, 27(1), 75-97.
Margulis, E. H., & Beatty, A. P. (2008). Musical style,
psychoaesthetics, and prospects for entropy as an analytic tool.
Computer Music Journal, 32(4), 64-78.
Meyer, L. B. (1967a). Meaning in music and information theory
Music, the arts, and ideas. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Meyer, L. B. (1967b). Some remarks on value and greatness in
music Music, the arts, and ideas. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Shannon, C. E. (1948). A mathematical theory of communication.
The Bell System Technical Journal, 27, 379-423, 623-656.
Snyder, J. L. (1990). Entropy as a measure of style: The influence of
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Youngblood, J. E. (1958). Style as information. Journal of Music
Theory, 2(1), 24-35.