Computational Methods for the Analysis of Musical Structure

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.