Musiplectics: Computational Assessment of the Complexity of Music Scores

In the Western classical tradition, musicians play music from notated sheet music, called a score. When playing music from a score, a musician translates its visual sym-bols into sequences of instrument-specific physical motions. Hence, a music score’s overall complexity represents a sum of the cognitive and mechanical acuity required for its per-formance. For a given instrument, different notes, intervals, articulations, dynamics, key signatures, and tempo represent dissimilar levels of difficulty, which vary depending on the performer’s proficiency. Individual musicians embrace this tenet, but may disagree about the degrees of difficulty. This paper introduces musiplectics1, a systematic and ob-jective approach to computational assessment of the com-plexity of a music score for any instrument. Musiplectic