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

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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