While wasting time reading Phys Rev E, I came across a recent article by Jesse Berezovsky on Renormalization-group approach to ordered phases in music (2024), which in turn lead me to the author’s earlier work The structure of musical harmony as an ordered phase of sound: A statistical mechanics approach to music theory (2019). The core idea of the latter is to use a Sethares-style dissonance function as the internal energy and then minimize the Helmholtz free energy. This is plausible because it describes an optimization between pattern (low energy) and variety (entropy) in music. Bereezovsky’s website has example compositions generated by this approach. And poking around on his google scholar, he has a 2024 March Meeting abstract on rhythm…having not seen the talk, I would speculate about treating this as like an Ising model/step-sequencer with some interaction.