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We present a dataset of 264 annotated piano pieces of nine composers, composed in the long 19th century (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7483349). Annotations adhere to the DCML harmony annotation standard and include Roman numerals, phrase boundaries, and cadence types. The scores are encoded in the XML-based MuseScore 3 format. Annotations are embedded within the MuseScore files. In addition, all harmony information, alongside key features of the encoded measure and note objects, is provided in the form of plaintext TSV-formatted tables for increased interoperability with other datasets and analysis tools. Annotations were collaboratively created and reviewed by a pool of trained music theorists. Collaboration took place asynchronously online via a semi-automated GitHub-based workflow designed for quality assurance, allowing cycles of revisions and reviews until consensus is reached. The full revision history is retained, providing data for further empirical research on inter-annotator agreement and related topics. We also present descriptive statistics about the nine corpora and the dataset as a whole, including comparisons of pitch-class contents, phrase lengths, modulations, and cadence types. We conclude with a discussion of our musicological principles for corpus building and considerations of representability.

This paper presents a new symbolic corpus of musical themes from the complete Star Wars trilogies (Episodes I-IX) by John Williams. The corpus files are made available in multiple formats (.krn, .sib., and .musicxml) and include melodic, harmonic, and formal information. The Star Wars Thematic Corpus (SWTC) contains a total of 64 distinctive, recurring, and symbolically meaningful themes and motifs, commonly referred to as leitmotifs. Through this corpus we also introduce a new humdrum standard for non-functional harmony encodings, **harte (Harte et al., 2005; Harte, 2010). This report details the motivation, describes the transcription and encoding processes, and provides some brief summary statistics. While relatively small in scale, the SWTC represents a unified collection from one of the most prolific and influential composers of the 20th and 21st centuries, and the under-studied subset of film and multimedia musical material in general. We hope the SWTC will provide insights into John Williams’ compositional style, as well as prove useful in comparisons against other thematic corpora from film and beyond.

We present a dataset of 264 annotated piano pieces of nine composers, composed in the long 19th century (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7483349). Annotations adhere to the DCML harmony annotation standard and include Roman numerals, phrase boundaries, and cadence types. The scores are encoded in the XML-based MuseScore 3 format. Annotations are embedded within the MuseScore files. In addition, all harmony information, alongside key features of the encoded measure and note objects, is provided in the form of plaintext TSV-formatted tables for increased interoperability with other datasets and analysis tools. Annotations were collaboratively created and reviewed by a pool of trained music theorists. Collaboration took place asynchronously online via a semi-automated GitHub-based workflow designed for quality assurance, allowing cycles of revisions and reviews until consensus is reached. The full revision history is retained, providing data for further empirical research on inter-annotator agreement and related topics. We also present descriptive statistics about the nine corpora and the dataset as a whole, including comparisons of pitch-class contents, phrase lengths, modulations, and cadence types. We conclude with a discussion of our musicological principles for corpus building and considerations of representability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While it is encouraging to see renewed attention to 'openness' in academia, that debate (and its interpretation of the F.A.I.R. principles) is often rather narrowly defined. This paper addresses openness in a broad sense, asking not so much whether a project is open, but how open and to whom. I illustrate these ideas through examples of my own ongoing projects which to seek to make the most of a potential symbiosis between academic and wider musical communities. Specifically, I discuss how these communities can both benefit from – and even work together on building – highly accessible and interoperable corpora of scores and analyses when ambitious openness is factored into decision making from the outset.

This essay focuses on the characteristics of corpora drawn from pedagogical materials and contrasts them with the properties of corpora of larger repertoires. Two case studies show pedagogical corpora to contain relatively more chromaticism, and to devote more of their probability mass to low-frequency events. This is likely due to the formatting of and motivation behind classroom materials (for example, focusing proportionately more resources on difficult concepts). I argue that my observations challenge the utility of using pedagogical corpora within research into implicit learning. I also suggest that these datasets are uniquely situated to yield insights into explicit learning, and into how musical traditions are represented in the classroom.

This paper presents a new symbolic corpus of musical themes from the complete Star Wars trilogies (Episodes I-IX) by John Williams. The corpus files are made available in multiple formats (.krn, .sib., and .musicxml) and include melodic, harmonic, and formal information. The Star Wars Thematic Corpus (SWTC) contains a total of 64 distinctive, recurring, and symbolically meaningful themes and motifs, commonly referred to as leitmotifs. Through this corpus we also introduce a new humdrum standard for non-functional harmony encodings, harte (Harte et al., 2005; Harte, 2010). This report details the motivation, describes the transcription and encoding processes, and provides some brief summary statistics. While relatively small in scale, the SWTC represents a unified collection from one of the most prolific and influential composers of the 20th and 21st centuries, and the under-studied subset of film and multimedia musical material in general. We hope the SWTC will provide insights into John Williams' compositional style, as well as prove useful in comparisons against other thematic corpora from film and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay focuses on the characteristics of corpora drawn from pedagogical materials and contrasts them with the properties of corpora of larger repertoires. Two case studies show pedagogical corpora to contain relatively more chromaticism, and to devote more of their probability mass to low-frequency events. This is likely due to the formatting of and motivation behind classroom materials (for example, focusing proportionately more resources on difficult concepts). I argue that my observations challenge the utility of using pedagogical corpora within research into implicit learning. I also suggest that these datasets are uniquely situated to yield insights into explicit learning, and into how musical traditions are represented in the classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While it is encouraging to see renewed attention to 'openness' in academia, that debate (and its interpretation of the F.A.I.R. principles) is often rather narrowly defined. This paper addresses openness in a broad sense, asking not so much whether a project is open, but how open and to whom. I illustrate these ideas through examples of my own ongoing projects which to seek to make the most of a potential symbiosis between academic and wider musical communities. Specifically, I discuss how these communities can both benefit from - and even work together on building - highly accessible and interoperable corpora of scores and analyses when ambitious openness is factored into decision making from the outset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mauch, MacCallum, Levy, and Leroi (2015) carried out a large-scale study of changes in American popular music between 1960 and 2010. Using signal processing methods, they found evidence suggesting a decreasing use of the dominant seventh chord and increasing use of the minor-minor seventh chord. While signal analysis methods have improved substantially in recent years, the accuracy of signal-based analysis remains imperfect. Using a contrasting method and independent musical sample, this paper reports converging evidence replicating these findings.

The goal of this research is to investigate the pitch structures of popular music in the 1960s through a large corpus study in order to identify any consistent changes in harmonic and tonal syntax. More specifically, two studies based on the Billboard DataSet (Burgoyne, Wild & Fujinaga, 2011; Burgoyne, 2011), a new corpus presenting transcriptions for more than 700 songs, are presented. The first study looks at the incidence of multi-tonic songs throughout the decade, while the second study focuses on the incidence of flat-side harmonies (e.g. bIII, bVI, and bVII) over the same period of time. While no difference was observed in the frequency of multi-tonic songs, the study showed a significant increase in the incidence of flat-side harmonies during the second half of the decade.

This paper responds to the research presented in Léveillé Gauvin’s paper on the evolution of harmonic syntax in popular music from the 1960s. I begin by situating the findings from his second study (on flat-side harmonies) within the context of my corpus work with David Temperley on harmony in popular music. Léveillé Gauvin’s results are similar to ours, although some important differences are worth noting. I also provide an interpretation of the results from his first study (on modulation), which Léveillé Gauvin found to be inconsistent with his proposed hypothesis. Specifically, I conjecture that modulation and harmonic palette may be in balance with one another, in that listeners may prefer songs where harmonic content is at a medium level of complexity. Léveillé Gauvin’s study also brings forth some basic issues with regard to harmonic encoding, in terms of both the subjectivity of the analytical process as well as the ease by which harmonic analyses are shared with and verified by other researchers.

The relative consonance/dissonance of 2-tone intervals is well understood both experimentally and theoretically and provides a strong foundation for explaining why diatonic scales or their subsets are used in most musical cultures. Frequent textbook assertions notwithstanding, however, the consonance of intervals fails to account for the basic facts of harmony (3 or more tone combinations). We have recently shown (Cook & Fujisawa, 2006) how consideration of 3-tone psychophysics can explain the fundamental regularities of diatonic harmony. Distinct from the dissonance of 2-tone intervals, 3-tone combinations introduce an effect described by Leonard Meyer (1956) as harmonic “tension”: when a third tone is located midway between an upper and a lower tone, the chord takes on an unresolved, unstable, tense character – a psychoacoustical property inherent to the diminished and augmented chords. If the effects of the upper partials are included in a formal model that includes both 2-tone and 3-tone effects, the perceived sonority of the triads (major>minor> diminished>augmented) is easily explained.

Cook & Fujisawa (2006) point out that, contrary to the predictions of psychoacoustic models, the diminished triad is more consonant and prevalent in western tonal music than the augmented. A possible simple explanation is that the diminished triad often functions as an incomplete dominant (major-minor) seventh chord, the most prevalent tetrad in mainstream tonal music.

In our history we have recognized scales of some variety as keystones to music’s pitch structure. And yet, empirical studies of perception and archeological appraisals of human evolution confirm an unchanging cognitive/perceptual ground for the musical experience; they render the ragas and modes and tonoi and scales of the past to be understood only as "local" explanations for things better understood by the space/time kinetics of limited elements rather than by frozen note paradigms. This paper concludes that an empirical study of music from a broad variety of times and cultures argues for a more elemental basis: thus coinage of the tonality frame. This conceptualization reunites harmonic nucleus with temporal span, meshing as well with ancient and exotic conceptualizations of hierarchical patterning.

In line with musical “common sense” (but contrary to the century-old tradition of musical psychophysics), we show that harmony is an inherently three-tone phenomenon. Previous attempts at explaining the affective response to major/minor chords and resolved/unresolved chords on the basis of the summation of interval dissonance have been notably unsuccessful, but consideration of the relative size of the intervals contained in triads leads directly to solutions to these historical problems. At the heart of our model is Leonard Meyer’s idea from 1956 concerning “intervallic equidistance” – i.e., the perception of “tension” inherent to any three-tone combination that has two intervals of equivalent size (e.g., the augmented chord). By including the effects of the upper partials, a psychophysical explanation of the perceived sonority of the triads (major>minor>diminished>augmented) and the affective valence of major and minor chords is easily achieved. We conclude that the perceptual regularities of traditional diatonic harmony are neither due to the summation of interval effects nor simply arbitrary, learned cultural artifacts, but rather that harmony has a psychophysical basis dependent on three-tone combinations.

Mauch, MacCallum, Levy, and Leroi (2015) carried out a large-scale study of changes in American popular music between 1960 and 2010. Using signal processing methods, they found evidence suggesting a decreasing use of the dominant seventh chord and increasing use of the minor-minor seventh chord. While signal analysis methods have improved substantially in recent years, the accuracy of signalbased analysis remains imperfect. Using a contrasting method and independent musical sample, this paper reports converging evidence replicating these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper responds to the research presented in Léveillé Gauvin’s paper on the evolution of harmonic syntax in popular music from the 1960s. I begin by situating the findings from his second study (on flat-side harmonies) within the context of my corpus work with David Temperley on harmony in popular music. Léveillé Gauvin’s results are similar to ours, although some important differences are worth noting. I also provide an interpretation of the results from his first study (on modulation), which Léveillé Gauvin found to be inconsistent with his proposed hypothesis. Specifically, I conjecture that modulation and harmonic palette may be in balance with one another, in that listeners may prefer songs where harmonic content is at a medium level of complexity. Léveillé Gauvin’s study also brings forth some basic issues with regard to harmonic encoding, in terms of both the subjectivity of the analytical process as well as the ease by which harmonic analyses are shared with and verified by other researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this research is to investigate the pitch structures of popular music in the 1960s through a large corpus study in order to identify any consistent changes in harmonic and tonal syntax. More specifically, two studies based on the Billboard DataSet (Burgoyne, Wild & Fujinaga, 2011; Burgoyne, 2011), a new corpus presenting transcriptions for more than 700 songs, are presented. The first study looks at the incidence of multi-tonic songs throughout the decade, while the second study focuses on the incidence of flat-side harmonies (e.g. bIII, bVI, and bVII) over the same period of time. While no difference was observed in the frequency of multi-tonic songs, the study showed a significant increase in the incidence of flat-side harmonies during the second half of the decade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author responds to points raised in David Temperley’s commentary, which appeared in Vol. 1, No. 2 of Empirical Musicology Review. The response includes a discussion of strengths and limitations of atemporal models of musical perception, with particular attention to presentations such as those of Carol Krumhansl and Fred Lerdahl.

While the concept of the perceptual “pitch frame” resembles leading theories of pitch structure in music in some respects, it contains some innovative elements that are discussed in this commentary. Additionally, the commentary focuses on the question of whether the “pitch frame” is a temporal or atemporal construct.