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, 15 December 2001, p 25).
To do this, you first take several long text files, each in a…
