The study of the factors that determine the complexity of rhythms has theoretical as well as practical relevance. On the theoretical side, a successful measure of complexity will shed light on the encoding and memory processes involved in rhythm perception. Hence, it will be able to indicate whether a given rhythm will be easy or difficult to memorize and reproduce. On the practical side, such a measure will complement current research in rhythm similarity and music pattern recognition in general. In this paper, three measures of complexity of musical rhythms are compared. The first mea-sure is based on the work of Tanguiane (1993), and uses the idea that a rhythmic pattern can be described in terms of (elaborations of) more simple patterns, simultaneously at different levels. The second measure is based on the complexity measure for finite sequences proposed by Lempel and Ziv (1976), which is related to the number of steps in a self-delimiting pro-duction process by which such a sequence is presumed to be generated. The third measure is rooted in the theoretical framework of rhythm perception discussed in Povel and Essens (1985). The predictive strength of the three measures has been evaluated in an experiment in which listeners judged the complexity of a set of selected rhythms on a 5-point scale. Results of the experiment will be reported and the strengths and weaknesses of the complexity measures as well as their relationship to current work in rhythm similarity will be discussed.

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