Music Theory

Studying the diachronic development of chromaticism and dissonance in western music over three centuries

Harmonic patterns in Brazilian choro, Western classical, and Anglophone popular music: a data-driven comparison

Encoding polymeter: A corpus of Hugo Distler's «Der Jahrkreis» op. 5 in different symbolic formats

We present DistlerCorpus, a corpus of Hugo Distler’s Der Jahrkreis op. 5.

Mapping the space of harmonic cadences between Brazilian choro, jazz and Anglophone popular music

This paper reports on an experiment extends a methodology to analyze and compare harmonic progressions at moments of formal segmentation in different styles based on corpora of Roman numeral annotations, and deploys it to the styles of Brazilian choro, Anglophone popular and jazz music.

Tong yun san gong theory: corpus evidence for the distinctions among three Chinese heptatonic diao

Establishment of an open digital collection of historical music theory texts from German-speaking countries based on 19th-century examples (DigiMusTh) – Project Documentation and Guidelines

Modeling the Evolution of Harmony in Popular Music from Different Cultural Contexts

Here, we introduce music-theoretically sensible notions of harmonic distance between chords, that allows us to arrive at more fine-grained results regarding relative influences of different kinds of harmonic relations on diachronic changes.

Fourier Qualia Wavescapes: Hierarchical Analyses of Set Class Quality and Ambiguity

We introduce a novel perspective on set-class analysis combining the DFT magnitudes with the music visualisation technique of wavescapes.

Transatlantic Transformations: On Neo-Riemannian Theories

Hugo Riemann never set foot on American soil. His harmonic theories, however, did cross the Atlantic and fell on fertile grounds, inspiring a rich repertoire of methods for music analysis that is nowadays usually subsumed under the name of neo-Riemannian theories (NRTs)—decidedly in the plural form. In this essay, I will review the central characteristics of NRTs and will relate how they connect with Hugo Riemann’s original works.

Challenging sources: a new dataset for OMR of diverse 19th-century music theory examples

This paper introduces the 19MT-OMR corpus that can be used to test OMR models on a diverse set of sources. We illustrate this challenge by discussing several examples from this data set.

19MT-OMR: A dataset for multimodal Optical Music Recognition

midiVERTO: A Web Application to Visualize Tonality in Real Time

Towards a Unified Model of Chords in Western Harmony

The line of fifths and the co-evolution of tonal pitch-classes

In this study, we determine the fundamental role of the line of fifths for the organization of tonal material by applying dimensionality reduction to a large historical corpus of pitch-class counts (ca. 1360–1940). We observe a historically growing trend in the exploitation of the fifths range, i.e. the size of segments that pitch-class distributions cover on the line of fifths. Moreover, we introduce the novel concept of pitch-class (co-)evolution.

Wavescapes: A visual hierarchical analysis of tonality using the discrete Fourier transform

We introduce wavescapes, a novel visualization method for tonal hierarchies that combines the visual representation of keyscapes with music analysis based on the discrete Fourier transformation (DFT) and illustrate it by analyzing compositions by Josquin, Bach, Liszt, Chopin, Scriabin, Webern, Coltrane, and Ligeti.

A Formal Model of Extended Tonal Harmony

Digitizing a 19th-Century Music Theory Debate for Computational Analysis

A Historical Analysis of Harmonic Progressions Using Chord Embeddings

Exploring the foundations of tonality: statistical cognitive modeling of modes in the history of Western classical music

The Tonal Diffusion Model

Harmony and Form in Brazilian Choro: A Corpus-Driven Approach to Musical Style Analysis

Transitions of Tonality: A Model-Based Corpus Study

Statistical characteristics of tonal harmony: A corpus study of Beethoven’s string quartets

[Review of David Huron. Voice Leading: The Science behind a Musical Art]

Tonality and functional equivalence: A multi-level model for the cognition of triadic progressions in 19th century music

Theorie der Tonfelder und Neo-Riemannian Theory

Albert Simons Theorie der Tonfelder und John Cloughs Flip-Flop Circles im Vergleich