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This according to researchers at the Dutch National Research Institute in Amsterdam who used Bzip2 to correctly identify compositions by Beethoven, Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix.

A standard PC file-compression program can tell the difference between classical music, jazz and rock, all without playing a single note. This new-found ability could help scholars identify the composers of music that until now has remained anonymous.

The technique exploits the ability of off-the-shelf “zip” data-compression software to do more than just squeeze PC files into manageable sizes. For instance, various zip programs have already been used to detect the language a piece of text is written in (New Scientist print edition, 15 December 2001).

To do this, you first take several long text files, each in a known language, and compress them, noting the file size of each. You then append the unknown file to each of the uncompressed, known files in turn, and compress them again, noting the difference that adding the unknown file makes in each case.

The smaller the difference, the more likely the languages are to be the same. That is because the zip program looks for duplicated sequences in the text to shrink it without losing information.

Rudi Cilibrasi, Paul Vit?nyi and Ronald de Wolf of the Dutch National Research Institute in Amsterdam wondered if such compression could also help distinguish between musical genres. So they tried it out on digital files of various pieces, including some from Beethoven, Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix.

more from [url=http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993602]The New scientist[/url]