Concept

Regression to the mean — where it appears

The tendency of an extreme value to be followed by a less extreme one, purely because extremes are rare. It accounts for a large part of the melodic rule that a leap should be answered by a step, with no preference for reversal anywhere in the model.

Named by 3 essays across 2 fields — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

How much of the rule a walk with no rule reproduces. Post-skip reversal in 20,000-note random walks with no melodic knowledge of any kind. An unbounded walk reverses after 50.0 per cent of leaps, which is the chance rate and is the check that the measurement is right. Confining it to 12 semitones raises that to 61.3 per cent. Reaching the 70 per cent that corpus studies report needs a central tendency of 0.95 — an almost deterministic pull back toward the middle at the edges of the range. A wall is not enough; there has to be a spring.

The leap that pays itself back

Every melody textbook teaches that a leap should be followed by a step in the opposite direction, and every corpus that has been counted agrees — around seven leaps in ten are answered that way. A random walk with two walls, no memory of the leap and no rule of any kind reverses after 61 per cent of them, and the residue is not a rule either. What is left when the walls are accounted for is a prediction the rule does not make, and it is the prediction that decides between them.

form · Melody

Where a twelfth comes from. The range of a walk with no walls, against how many notes it runs for, at three settings of the one parameter it has. The parameter is fitted to the post-skip reversal rate and to nothing else; the range is then read off. With no central tendency at all the walk passes two octaves by 60 notes and keeps going. At the setting that reproduces 70 per cent reversal — κ = 0.78 — the range is 11.9 semitones at thirty notes and 17.9 at a hundred and twenty. It grows logarithmically, so over the whole plausible length of a tune it sits between an octave and a fifteenth, and a twelfth is the middle of that. The three tunes carried here are marked and all three fall below the curve.

The twelfth, and where it comes from

Melodies occupy about an octave and a fifth, and an earlier essay set out to explain that by the singer's register break and found that it does not: the chest mechanism alone spans two octaves and a semitone. The answer is in a parameter the essay on leaps fitted and then put down. A walk with no walls whose central tendency reproduces the post-skip reversal rate has a range that grows logarithmically — six semitones at eight notes, twelve at thirty, eighteen at a hundred and twenty — so across every length a tune plausibly has, the span is between an octave and a fifteenth.

form · Melody

The distribution that can be measured is not the one the player has. A player aiming at a short note of 100 milliseconds with a standard deviation of 15, against a floor at 100. The pale curve is what the player is doing and the heavy one is what can be recorded, because the 50 per cent of the parent below the floor arrives at the floor instead. The measured mean is 112.0 milliseconds rather than 100 and the measured standard deviation is 9.0 rather than 15. At 160 beats per minute that turns an intended swing ratio of 2.75 into a measured 2.35.

A quantity resting against a wall

The short note of a swung pair was found sitting exactly on the fast edge of the tempo window. If that edge is a floor rather than a fitted number, then every swing statistic computed until now was computed on a censored sample — and a censored sample has a mean that is 0.80 standard deviations too high, a spread that is 40 per cent too low, and a correction gain that can come out twice what the players actually have.

rhythm · Microtiming

Named alongside it

The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.

Melodic interval Null model Phrase Post-skip reversal Tessitura Censoring Contour Jitter Microtiming Motor delay Random walk Register

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