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.

In this study, we use the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model to discover tonal structures in a corpus of more than 2000 musical pieces from large historical range (ca. 600 years). and that the inferred topics have music-theoretically meaningful interpretations.