Computational Methods for the Analysis of Musical Structure

Download or read book Computational Methods for the Analysis of Musical Structure written by Craig Stuart Sapp and published by Stanford University. This book was released on 2011 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Music is an art form which is realized in time. This dissertation presents computational methods for examining the temporality of music at multiple time-scales so that both short-term surface features and deeper long-term structures can be studied and related to each other. The methods are applied in particular to musical key analysis (Chapters 2-4) and also adapted for use in performance analysis (Chapters 5-6). The essential methodology is to examine all sequential time-scales within a piece using some analytic process and then arrange a summary of the analytic results into a maximally overlapped arrangement. Chapter 2 defines a two-dimensional plotting domain for displaying musical features at all possible time-scales which forms a basis for further analysis methods. The resulting structures in the plots can be examined subjectively as a navigational aid in the music as illustrated in Chapters 3 and 5. They can also be used to extract musically relevant information as discussed in Chapters 4 and 6.