Who composed more syncopated songs:
     George Gershwin or Stephen Foster?

Approach:

     There are many types of syncopation -- such as AGOGIC syncopation
     and TONAL syncopation  ...

     For this demonstration, let's focus on so-called METRIC syncopation
     -- when note-onsets don't coincide with the metric hierarchy.

     Use the SYNCO command to characterize the degree of metric
     syncopation for each moment in a sample of musical scores.

     For this demonstration we will simply average the syncopation
     for each measure of music.  Five pieces will be compared for
     both Gershwin and Foster.

     The TIMEBASE command transforms the **kern representation so
     that each line of code represents identical spans of time.

     The METPOS command characterizes the metric position of each
     sonority.

     The SYNCO command measures the degree of metric syncopation
     -- where high numbers are most syncopated.

     Here is the appropriate humdrum command sequence:

          timebase -t 8 score | metpos | synco -e

                 Average syncopation per measure:

                      Gershwin         Foster
                      ========         ======
			0.31		0.08
			0.13		0.06
			0.30		0.08
			0.42		0.05
			0.08		0.00

     On the basis of this small sample, Gershwin's songs appear to
     have a higher degree of metric syncopatation than Foster's songs.