Un indicador para evaluar la Complejidad Intrínseca en notación musical de la Práctica Común

This experimental study emerges from the need to have quantitative values that distinguish the complexity of learning and execution of the different elements of musical notation. Although the relationship between music and complexity is vast, there is not much information about complexity models and musical notation. Still, we managed to design a model that distinguishes Intrinsic Complexity in a group of Common Practice music notation elements. A first experiment, performed on a corpus of music education books (N = 64), allows us to build a basic set of music notation items, filtered from their huge set. This selection was organized by two variables: Ordinality and Preference, which is statistically significant to be included in a complexity measurement (Pearson correlation of -0.88; p < 0.001). With the help of a decision risk measurement calculus, we conducted a second experiment, where we constructed a new indicator based on the above variables. This, which we call the Relevance Indicator, assigns a different intrinsic complexity value for each musical notation element. Finally, it is important to emphasize that the relationship between statistics and music theory is far from having rigorous results, this text reports an approach from the simplest statistics and aims to be part of the integration between this and music theory.