Dana Milstein, Proposed Project on Nietzsche and Stylometry

Stylometry analysis is traditionally used to authenticate the authorship

(or forgery) of a target document (written, musical, etc.). Quantitative
Stylometry uses statistical analysis and machine learning to analyze
content for specific attributes or features in vocabulary, sentence
structure, phrases and other patterns (or, in the case of music, of style
markers in tempo, phrasing, chord progression, etc.) Pandora, for
example, relies on stylometry to recommend similar style songs based
on users playlists (Bellaachia and Jimenez). In recent musical
stylometry studies, twenty features (style markers) were measured
in musical scores with a leave-one-out-error rate of 4-9%; the
process allowed researchers to identify J.L. Krebs as the likely
composer of a work formerly attributed to Bach. Other researchers
explore composer classification by grammatical inference; rather than
use Markov chains, these scholars rely on GI to discover underlying
structure(s) of symbolic sequential datathat may have variable
length and may be non-contiguous (Geertzen and van Zaanen). One
advantage of using language modeling techniques for musical
stylometry is that it can provide results that are fairly accurate without
advanced knowledge in musicology or score analysis (Hontanilla et al).
In cases where a person is inspired to compose across different forms
(i.e., philosophical written text, musical composition), can we use
stylometry to identify attributes, patterns, or a style that transcends
forms? Nietzsche, for example, wrote that improvisation at the
keyboard could serve as a model for writing prose; in fact, some
scholars speculate that Nietzsches aphorisms are styled after musical
structures and forms. This project, as with Professor Kaplans
Rousseau Stylometry Project (see Lagos), stems from these precursory
questions:
1. Can we find patterns in Nietzsches writing that correspond to
patterns in his musical compositions? In other words, is there a
rhetoric, set of universals or underlying symbolic or referential
structure that we can discern in both the written and musical
compositions? (Note: see Pareyons thesis)
2. Was Nietzsches musical composition typically Romantic or
Symbolic? Wagnerian? Frederick Love (1963) argues that
Nietzsches Die Meistersinger was the only one of the mature
works that Nietzsche acquired fully on his own, and argued that
Schumann was the primary influence, not Wagner, and that
Nietzsches work anticipated Mahler and von Webern.
3. What are the most characteristic attributes of Nietzsches
compositionswritten and musical? (Note: see Bellmans thesis)

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4. What implications does this serve for multi-faceted artists and

for cognitive embodiment and neurohumanities studies?

References
Backer, Eric and Peter van Kranenburg. On Musical StylometryA
Pattern Recognition Approach. Pattern Recognition Letters 26.3
(2005): 299-309.
Bellaachia, Abdellghani and Edward Jimenez. Exploring PerformanceBased Music Attributes for Stylometric Analysis. World Academy of
Science, Engineering and Technology 55 (2009): 509-511.
Bellman, Hector. Categorization of Tonal Music Style: A Quantitative
Investigation. Masters Thesis. Retrieved February 17, 2015 at
https://www120.secure.griffith.edu.au/rch/file/1cf4aba7-cf39-ef53ec9e-4708168fd5ca/1/Bellmann_2012_02Thesis.pdf.
Geertzen, Jeroen and Menno van Zaanen. Composer Classification
Using Grammatical Inference. Workshop on Machine Learning and
Music, 2008. Retrieved February 17, 2015 at
http://ilk.uvt.nl/menno/files/docs/p_mml_geertzen08.pdf.
Hontanilla, Maria et al. Composer Recognition Using Language
Models. Signal Processing, Pattern Recognition, and Applications.
ACTA Press, 2011.
Lagos, Jorge. Musical StylometricsThe Case of Rousseaus Music.
Retrieved February 17, 2015 at http://dh101.ch/2012/12/12/state-ofthe-art-project-5-musical-stylometrics-the-case-of-rousseaus-music/.
Pareyon, Gabriel. On Musical Self-Similarity. Intersemiosis as
Synecdoche and Analogy. Helsinki: International Semiotics Institute,
2011.
---. Aspects of Order in Language and in Music: A Referential-Structural
Research on Universals. The Hague, 2004. Masters Thesis.
Retrieved February 17, 2015 at
https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10138/33875/Master_thesi
s.pdf?sequence=2.
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