Zip Compression Can Identify Composers?

Bleeding Edge

from the sneaky dept

I’m sure that people who created various compression techniques never thought it would be used for something so unrelated as identifying who composed a particular piece of music. Over a year ago we wrote about someone who had worked out a way to use gzip compression to help identify the authors of text files. People here were pretty skeptical how well it worked, but now some people claim they’ve taken the same basic idea and are using it to try to identify composers of musical pieces. They claim the similarities in how they are compressed cna yield a pretty unique compression fingerprint, which makes it easier to match a piece of music with its composer – assuming the composer has a few pieces of music attributed to him or her. At this point, it sounds like they still have quite a lot of work to do though, as the best they’ve demonstrated, is that they can say what genre a piece of music is. Going from genre to the actual composer seems like quite a large step.