Exploring music21 and gensim for music data analysis and visualization

Abstract

Computational musicology has been garnering attention since the 1950s. Musicologists appreciate the utilisation of computing power to look for patterns in music. The bottlenecks in the early days were attributed to the lack of standardization of computer representation of music and the lack of computing techniques specialized for the music domain. However, due to the increase in computing power, advances in music technology and machine learning techniques in recent years; the field of computational musicology has been revitalized. In this paper, we explored Music21 toolkit and Gensim, the recent open-source data analytical tool which includesd the Word2Vec model, for an analysis of Bach Chorales. The tools and techniques discussed in this paper have revealed many interesting exploratory fronts such as the semantic analogies of musical concepts which deserve a detailed investigation by computational musicologists.