Arrow of time across five centuries of classical music

This paper considers classical music pieces as stochastic trajectories and explores the extent to which these display statistical time irreversibility, i.e. whether a preferential time arrow emerges with an associated entropy production. Since 1/f noise ---a paradigm to explain the complexity of music--- is by construction time reversible, finding clear signatures of time irreversibility in music suggests that linear temporal correlations are not sufficient to explain the statistical patterns underlying musical compositions.