What makes good music?

HIT songs are big business, so there is an incentive for composers to try to tease out those ingredients that might increase their chances of success. This, however, is hard. Songs are complex mixtures of features. How to analyse them is not obvious and is made more difficult still by the fact that what is popular changes over time. But Natalia Komarova, a mathematician at the University of California, Irvine, thinks she has cracked the problem. As she writes in Royal Society Open Science this w...