A New Corpus for Computational Music Research and A Novel Method for Musical Structure Analysis

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new structured corpus of Baroque allemandes and a hierarchical analysis method using tree representations to better understand musical structure through shared patterns and repetitions.

Contribution

It provides a novel corpus of Baroque allemandes and a top-down hierarchical analysis method based on pairwise differences of Schenkerian-inspired analyses.

Findings

Rich hierarchical descriptions of musical structure

Effective identification of shared patterns and repetitions

Enhanced understanding of musical form in the corpus

Abstract

Computational models of music, while providing good descriptions of melodic development, still cannot fully grasp the general structure comprised of repetitions, transpositions, and reuse of melodic material. We present a corpus of strongly structured baroque allemandes, and describe a top-down approach to abstract the shared structure of their musical content using tree representations produced from pairwise differences between the Schenkerian-inspired analyses of each piece, thereby providing a rich hierarchical description of the corpus.