The computational strand of the ERC project is devoted to the computational exploration of syntactic and hierarchical structures in music. We have two central goals: Addressing the lack of machine-readable corpora in music research, the first involves the development of tools to represent and annotate hierarchical analyses and the preparation of corpora of syntactic musical analyses. For the second goal, we develop computational models of the hierarchical structure of music, such as parsers of theoretical models, models of musical grammar inference or heuristic models that operate at the note level.
Main results
Code and Applications
- An app for the annotation of harmonic syntax trees
- An app for the annotation of hierarchical musical analyses (Reductive Annotation App)
- Hierarchical Pitch Scapes
Datasets
- The Jazz Harmony Treebank: A dataset of tree analyses of Jazz standards
Research
- A model of harmonic syntax applied to Jazz
- An advanced model combining harmonic syntax and harmonic rhythm
- A model of hierarchical pitch structure based on pitch scapes
- The Tonal diffusion model: a probabilistic model to characterize pitch distributions of given pieces along the dimensions of the Tonnetz
Showcase
A grammar theory of Jazz harmony
The regularities underlying the structure building of chord sequences, harmonic phrases, and combinations of phrases constitute a central research problem in music theory. This article proposes a formalization of Jazz harmony with a generative framework based on formal grammars, in which syntactic structure tightly corresponds with the functional interpretation of the sequence. It assumes that (…)
A Formal Model of Extended Tonality
Extended tonality is a central system that characterizes the music from the 19th up to the 21st century, including styles like popular music, film music or Jazz. Developing from classical major-minor tonality, the harmonic language of extended tonality forms its own set of rules and regularities, which are a result of the freer combinatoriality of (…)
Protovoices – a New Model of Free Polyphony
At this year’s ISMIR Conference, we presented our work on protovoices. Protovoices address the problem of how the notes are organized in a piece of music written in free polyphony. Free polyphony means that the notes are neither organized in a fixed set of voices (as in a chorale or a fugue) nor in simple (…)