John Z McKay

Music analysis frequently appeals to implicit statistical arguments in asserting the normative forms of musical structures, as well as in interpreting apparently unusual musical features. With the increasing trend toward corpus studies and music informatics within the field of music theory, the explicit use of statistical methods is also becoming more common. This essay presents an outline of some elements of statistical and probabilistic arguments that music theorists should consider when representing musical elements as data to be analyzed. Even in the analysis of individual works, where traditional statistics may not seem applicable, the properties of expected distributions of musical materials within the data may help to judge whether a given musical feature is a significant finding or merely a coincidence. Finally, a number of potential numerical pitfalls are described, where intuitions about relationships within data often fail and can lead to inappropriate conclusions or anomalous results.

J. B. Kennedy recently proposed a radical new interpretation of the Platonic dialogues , arguing that their stichometric structure is based in a Greek twelve-tone musical scale. We explore to what extent such an interpretation might be borne out historically by Greek music-theoretical traditions: the concept of scale, the significance of number 12 (on which Kennedy's theory is anchored), conceptual differences between Harmonicists and Pythagoreans, and the applicability of Kennedy's scale within the context of Plato's thought. While the statistical correlations Kennedy notes are intriguing, their foundation in Greek music-theoretical traditions proves problematic .