Minimum description length for selection of models of musical rhythm

We apply the minimum description length (MDL) methodology from information theory in order to select mathematical models for musical rhythm. We consider six models proposed by David Temperley and mathematically formalize them, which allows for an MDL analysis. As a consequence, we find that two of the models are not suitable to apply this methodology, as their codification strategy does not represent all possible rhythm sequences. A slight modification of Temperley's hierarchical model provides an improvement in codification performance, robust across all the four corpora considered in the experiments: three classical corpora commonly used in music studies and one of tango songs recently released. Our study confirms the usefulness of the MDL approach to solve the classical trade-off between model complexity and its ability to fit the data.