A new computer model can create an image of the structure of music. (Courtesy of Dmitri Tymoczko)

Technology has arrived that lets us see why, exactly, we like or dislike a piece of music. A Princeton University composer, Dmitri Tymoczko, says traditional Western music is attractive partly because it obeys basic music-theory rules of "voice leading"--the way notes move from one chord to the next. (The rules say the steps should be fairly small.) He created a computer program that vividly shows how far a piece of music diverges from these rules.

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