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

Moss, Fabian C.; Neuwirth, Markus; Harasim, Daniel; Rohrmeier, Martin

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0217242

Cited by 29 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…For the domain of harmony, the key criterion is root motion 7,15 . In common-practice tonality, there is a strong preference for root motion to be in descending fifths (this also applies to the Jazz idiom 16 ), followed by descending thirds and ascending seconds; root motions inverting these interval directions (ascending fifth, ascending third, and descending second) are less prominent [17][18][19] . This distribution sets common-practice tonality apart from Pop/ Rock tonality, which is characterised by almost a reversal of these frequencies 20 .…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Impact of Voice Leading and Harmony on Musical Expectancy

Wall

Lieck

Neuwirth

et al. 2020

Sci Rep

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In Western tonal music, voice leading (VL) and harmony are two central concepts influencing whether a musical sequence is perceived as well-formed. However, experimental studies have primarily focused on the effect of harmony on the cognitive processing of polyphonic music. The additional effect of VL remains unknown, despite music theory suggesting VL to be tightly connected to harmony. therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate and compare the effects of both VL and harmony on listener expectations. Using a priming paradigm and a choice reaction time task, participants (n = 34) were asked to indicate whether the final chord in a sequence had a different timbre than the preceding ones (cover task), with the experimental conditions being good and poor VL or harmony, respectively. An analysis with generalised mixed effects models revealed a significant influence of both VL and harmony on reaction times (RTs). Moreover, pairwise comparison showed significantly faster RTs when VL was good as compared to both VL and harmony being poor, which was not the case when only harmony was good. this study thus provides evidence for the additional importance of VL for the processing of Western polyphonic music.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Impact of Voice Leading and Harmony on Musical Expectancy

Wall

Lieck

Neuwirth

et al. 2020

Sci Rep

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“…The study of (tonal) harmony thus occupies a prominent position in musicological research. Owing to the growing availability of machine-readable datasets of harmonic analyses (see Section 2), harmony can now be examined across different styles and periods using advanced computational and empirical methods (e.g., Quinn and Mavromatis, 2011;Broze and Shanahan, 2013;Temperley and de Clercq, 2013;Jacoby et al, 2015;Chen and Su, 2018;White and Quinn, 2018;Moss et al, 2019). The main contribution of this paper is the introduction and description of a new corpus of annotated scores under the FAIR principles of Open Science (Wilkinson et al, 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Annotated Mozart Sonatas: Score, Harmony, and Cadence

Hentschel

Neuwirth

Rohrmeier

2021

Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval

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This article describes a new expert-labelled dataset featuring harmonic, phrase, and cadence analyses of all piano sonatas by W.A. Mozart. The dataset draws on the DCML standard for harmonic annotation and is being published adopting the FAIR principles of Open Science. The annotations have been verified using a data triangulation procedure which is presented as an alternative approach to handling annotator subjectivity. This procedure is suited for ensuring consistency, within the dataset and beyond, despite the high level of analytical detail afforded by the employed harmonic annotation syntax. The harmony labels also encode contextual information and are therefore suited for investigating music theoretical questions related to tonal harmony and the harmonic makeup of cadences in the classical style. Apart from providing basic statistical analyses characterizing the dataset, its music theoretical potential is illustrated by two preliminary experiments, one on the terminal harmonies of cadences and the other on the relation between performance durations and harmonic density. Furthermore, particular features can be selected to produce more coarse-grained training data, for example for chord detection algorithms that require less analytical detail. Facilitating the dataset's reusability, it comes with a Python script that allows researchers to easily access various representations of the data tailored to their particular needs.

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“…With the advent of digital technology, musicology is being enriched with novel research methods. Digital archives and computational strategies enable musical corpus studies in a quantitative and systematic fashion [41,44,56,61,64,69,76]. Such studies have recently been performed based on a variety of different music representations including scanned sheet music images [61,74], symbolic scores [5,44,73], MIDI files [35,47,79], and audio recordings [1,41,64,75,76].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the first case, music experts analyze and annotate the primary material (e.g., scores or recordings) based on their music theory knowledge [11,48] (piece analysis). Subsequently, computational and statistical methods are applied for systematically analyzing the annotations and drawing conclusions from these statistics [44] (corpus analysis). This approach entails full human control of the piece analysis but involves a decent amount of manual work, which becomes impractical in the case of large corpora.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Schubert Winterreise Dataset

Weiß

Zalkow

Arifi-Müller

et al. 2021

J. Comput. Cult. Herit.

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This article presents a multimodal dataset comprising various representations and annotations of Franz Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise . Schubert’s seminal work constitutes an outstanding example of the Romantic song cycle—a central genre within Western classical music. Our dataset unifies several public sources and annotations carefully created by music experts, compiled in a comprehensive and consistent way. The multimodal representations comprise the singer’s lyrics, sheet music in different machine-readable formats, and audio recordings of nine performances, two of which are freely accessible for research purposes. By means of explicit musical measure positions, we establish a temporal alignment between the different representations, thus enabling a detailed comparison across different performances and modalities. Using these alignments, we provide for the different versions various musicological annotations describing tonal and structural characteristics. This metadata comprises chord annotations in different granularities, local and global annotations of musical keys, and segmentations into structural parts. From a technical perspective, the dataset allows for evaluating algorithmic approaches to tasks such as automated music transcription, cross-modal music alignment, or tonal analysis, and for testing these algorithms’ robustness across songs, performances, and modalities. From a musicological perspective, the dataset enables the systematic study of Schubert’s musical language and style in Winterreise and the comparison of annotations regarding different annotators and granularities. Beyond the research domain, the data may serve further purposes such as the didactic preparation of Schubert’s work and its presentation to a wider public by means of an interactive multimedia experience. With this article, we provide a detailed description of the dataset, indicate its potential for computational music analysis by means of several studies, and point out possibilities for future research.

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

Cited by 29 publications

References 25 publications

The Impact of Voice Leading and Harmony on Musical Expectancy

The Impact of Voice Leading and Harmony on Musical Expectancy

The Annotated Mozart Sonatas: Score, Harmony, and Cadence

Schubert Winterreise Dataset

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