Harmonic syntax and high-level statistics of the songs of three early Classical composers
Wendy de Heer
EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley
Technical Report No. UCB/EECS-2017-167
December 1, 2017
http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2017/EECS-2017-167.pdf
Understanding the statistical properties of music has become relevant to an increasing number of real-world applications over the last two decades. Although a majority of research has focused on low-level, signal-processing based features of music and their corresponding statistics, appropriately chosen higher-level features of music, such as the melody line, can supplement and sometimes even outperform low-level features of music in classification tasks. This paper explores the statistics of higher-order features of the musical works of three early Classical composers from two different but closely related musical periods: Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525-1594) from the Renaissance period, Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643), who wrote in the period transitioning from Renaissance to Baroque, and Joann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), from the Baroque period. We analysed chord frequency distribution and mapped out co-occurrences between chords over different time-window lengths, in order to determine whether chord co-occurrence statistics change based on composer. We furthermore performed both clustering and classification analyses on the chord co-occurrences for all three composers. <p> <b>Advisor:</b> John F. Canny
BibTeX citation:
@mastersthesis{de Heer:EECS-2017-167, Author= {de Heer, Wendy}, Title= {Harmonic syntax and high-level statistics of the songs of three early Classical composers}, School= {EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley}, Year= {2017}, Month= {Dec}, Url= {http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2017/EECS-2017-167.html}, Number= {UCB/EECS-2017-167}, Abstract= {Understanding the statistical properties of music has become relevant to an increasing number of real-world applications over the last two decades. Although a majority of research has focused on low-level, signal-processing based features of music and their corresponding statistics, appropriately chosen higher-level features of music, such as the melody line, can supplement and sometimes even outperform low-level features of music in classification tasks. This paper explores the statistics of higher-order features of the musical works of three early Classical composers from two different but closely related musical periods: Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525-1594) from the Renaissance period, Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643), who wrote in the period transitioning from Renaissance to Baroque, and Joann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), from the Baroque period. We analysed chord frequency distribution and mapped out co-occurrences between chords over different time-window lengths, in order to determine whether chord co-occurrence statistics change based on composer. We furthermore performed both clustering and classification analyses on the chord co-occurrences for all three composers. <p> <b>Advisor:</b> John F. Canny}, }
EndNote citation:
%0 Thesis %A de Heer, Wendy %T Harmonic syntax and high-level statistics of the songs of three early Classical composers %I EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley %D 2017 %8 December 1 %@ UCB/EECS-2017-167 %U http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2017/EECS-2017-167.html %F de Heer:EECS-2017-167