Transformational Processes in Musical Sequences and Brain States: the Drinking Scene in Otello

Can music depict the development of a neurological process leading to impairment? This article studies the case of the progressive loss of control due to alcohol intoxication, represented musically in a scene of Verdi???s opera Otello. After a first qualitative assessment, we propose a quantitative comparison between musically derived dynamics, capturing pitch and onset distributions, and a toy model of a brain transformational process. This yields a combination of parameters that makes the two dynamics comparable.