Research Seminars

Computational Techniques for Music Harmony Analysis

Craig Sapp
Royal Holloway, University of London

Wednesday 18 January 2006, 4:00pm, Room 105

Abstract

Automatically extracting harmonic structure from a musical composition is useful for many applications, such as composer and style identification, form analysis, and polyphonic database searching. Also, phrase structure, which is closely related to the harmonic structure of a composition, is an important component for generating humanized automatic performances of musical scores.

I will present computational techniques for analyzing harmony in a tonal music score, from top-level key structure to low-level chord root identification. For key structure, I will show 2D visualizations generated using various key-analysis algorithms. For chord analysis, I will present my work on root identification.