https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-025-00586-2
Research
Understanding rhythmic structures, novelty, and influence in classical music from data
1
Graduate School of Culture Technology (GSCT), Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), 291 Daehak-ro, 34141, Yuseong-gu, Daejeon, Republic of Korea (South Korea)
2
School of Computational Sciences, Korea Institute for Advanced Study, 85 Hoegi-ro, 02455, Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea (South Korea)
Received:
31
December
2024
Accepted:
5
September
2025
Published online:
30
September
2025
Rhythm plays a fundamental and critical role in human cognition of time-series stimuli, and is deeply correlated with emotional experiences. Rhythm is therefore a crucial element of music as well, and it is not difficult to picture composers of music heavily invested in the rhythmic structure of their creative works. In this work, we analyze 
classical piano compositions by preeminent western composers across different periods—often regarded as the pinnacle of auditory art—to understand how the composers’ efforts in rhythmic creativity is manifested as data. We investigate how those composers dealt with the widely-asked core question of creative challenge, i.e. the inherently competing objectives of achieving novelty and value simultaneously. By examining the composers’ techniques and strategies in rhythm from extensive musical data, we aim to understand how exploratory or combinatorial creativity led to rhythmic innovation and offer more insights into the nature of human creativity.
Key words: Creativity / Novelty / Influence / Distinctiveness / Music / Rhythm
Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-025-00586-2.
© The Author(s) 2025
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
