A conditional model for tonal analysis

Abstract

Tonal harmony analysis is arguably one of the most sophisticated tasks that musicians deal with. It combines general knowledge with contextual cues, being ingrained with both faceted and evolving objects, such as musical language, execution style, or even taste. In the present work we introduce BREVE, a system for tonal analysis. BREVE automatically learns to analyse music using the recently developed framework of conditional models. The system is presented and assessed on a corpus of Western classical pieces from the 18th to the late 19th Centuries repertoire. The results are discussed and interesting issues in modeling this problem are drawn. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.