Concepts for Computing Patterns in 15th Century Korean Music

Computational musicology denotes the use of computers for analyzing music. This paper proposes applying techniques from stringology for analyzing classical Korean music. Historically, Sejong, the fourth king of the Joseon Dynasty in Korea, intended to rule the country with courtesy and music following the teaching of Neo-Confucianism. For this, he invented a music score in which music could be written. He made the structure of the music score based on the meaning of Neo-Confucianism, and recorded contemporary music with two notation patterns. In this paper, we first study the patterns in the structure of the music score and then investigate the notation patterns by which contemporary music was recorded in the music score. Finally, we establish links between these musical patterns and computing pattern inference for music via the field of stringology. Future research directions are outlined. Keywords–Korean music; Lyndon word; Musicology; Notation pattern; Stringology; Structure of music score; V -word.