The harmonic musical surface and two novel chord representation schemes

Abstract

Selecting an appropriate representation for chords is important for encoding pertinent harmonic aspects of the musical surface, and, at the same time, is crucial for building effective computational models for music analysis. This chapter, initially, addresses musicological, perceptual and computational aspects of the harmonic musical surface. Then, two novel general chord representations are presented: the first, the General Chord Type (GCT) representation, is inspired by the standard Roman numeral chord type labelling, but is more general and flexible so as to be applicable to any idiom; the second, the Directed Interval Class (DIC) vector, captures the intervallic content of a transition between two chords in a transposition-invariant idiom-independent manner. Musical examples and preliminary evaluations of both encoding schemes are given, illustrating their potential to form a basis for harmonic processing in the domain of computational musicology.