Representation and discovery of vertical patterns in music

Abstract

The automated discovery of recurrent patterns in music is a fundamental task in computational music analysis. This paper describes a new method for discovering patterns in the vertical and horizontal dimensions of polyphonic music. A formal representation of music objects is used to structure the musical surface, and several ideas for viewing pieces as successions of vertical structures are examined. A knowledge representation method is used to view pieces as sequences of relationships between music objects, and a pattern discovery algorithm is applied using this view of the Bach chorale harmonizations to find significant recurrent patterns. The method finds a small set of vertical patterns that occur in a large number of pieces in the corpus. Most ofthese patterns represent specific voice leading formulae within cadences.