Work

Automatic Functional Harmonic Analysis

Year: 2013

Type: article

Abstract: Music scholars have been studying tonal harmony intensively for centuries, yielding numerous theories and models. Unfortunately, a large number of these theories are formulated in a rather informal fashion and lack mathematical precision. In this article we present HarmTrace, a functional model of Western tonal harmony that builds on well-known theories of tonal harmony. In contrast to other approaches that remain purely theoretical, we present an implemented system that is evaluated empirically. Given a sequence of symbolic chord labels, HarmTrace automatically derives the harmonic relations between chords. For this, we use advanced functional programming techniques that are uniquely available in the Haskell programming language. We show that our system is fast, easy to modify and maintain, robust against noisy data, and that its harmonic analyses comply with Western tonal harmony theory.

Source: Computer Music Journal

DOI: 10.1162/comj_a_00209

Authors: W. Bas De Haas, José Pedro Magalhães, Frans Wiering, Remco C. Veltkamp

Institutions: Utrecht University, University of Oxford

Language: English

Topic: Music Technology and Sound Studies

Subfield: Music

Field: Arts and Humanities

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: hybrid

Funders: Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council

Awards: G1792342811, G285244920, Unifying Theories of Generic Programming