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Hidden within nearly 2,000 pieces of classical music, a mathematical pattern that not only holds constant over 400 years of musical history, but also corresponds to fluctuations in everything from the human heartbeat to traffic flow on busy highways.

Physicists call the equation in question a one-over-f power distribution.

In its simplest form, it’s a way of mathematically describing the relative frequency of events. In a one-over-f distribution, the second most common event happens half as often as the most common, the third most common event happens one-third as often, and so on.

One-over-f patterns are everywhere.

The formula describes annual flooding levels of the Nile River, voltage fluctuations in electronic components and traffic flow on U.S. interstates. It can be found in the signals across nerve endings, the minute variations of a human heartbeat, even in DNA patterns.

He and his colleagues took 1,788 different pieces of music by composers from J.S. Bach to Scott Joplin and broke each line of music down according to the length of its individual notes. Entering the data took 500 hours, but the result was worth it.

“There’s a kind of mathematical signature that ties together all the works of an individual composer,” Levitin said. “That was just astonishing to us.”

Nobody knows why all this should be, but Levitin has a theory.

“Our brains have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. Part of the evolution of brains is that they have to incorporate certain regularities and principles of the physical world, even ones we’re not aware of. There are these things that are built into the structure of the brain that follow regularities in the physical world. I think this one-over-f is something (like that).

“The brain knows about this one-over-f distribution even if we don’t … It’s evidence that music may be tapping into structures of our brain.”

Levitin’s analysis didn’t extend to jazz or pop music – or to non-Western music such as Indian ragas. But he sees no reason to believe those musics should be any different.