Abstract
This paper presents a web application for visualizing the tonality of a piece of music—the organization of its chords and scales—at a high level of abstraction and with coordinated playback. The application applies the discrete Fourier transform to the pitch-class domain of a user-specified segmentation of a MIDI file and visualizes the Fourier coefficients' trajectories. Since the coefficients indicate different musical properties, such as harmonic function, triadicity, and diatonicity, the application isolates aspects of a piece’s tonality and shows their development in time. The aim of the application is to bridge a gap between mathematical music theory, musicology, and the general public by making the discrete Fourier transform as applied to the pitch-class domain accessible without requiring advanced mathematical knowledge or programming skills up front.
Fabian C. Moss
Assistant Professor for Digital Music Philology and Music Theory
Fabian C. Moss is an assistant professor for Digital Music Philology and Music Theory at Julius-Maximilians University Würzburg (JMU), Germany.