The Computational Analysis of Harmony in Western Art Music.
Lesley Mearns · 2013
I certify that this thesis, and the research to which it refers, are the product of my own work, and that any ideas or quotations from the work of other people, published or otherwise, are fully acknowledged in accordance with the standard referencing practices of the discipline. I acknowledge the helpful guidance and support of my supervisor, Dr. Simon Dixon. This thesis describes research in the computational analysis of harmony in western art music, focussing particularly on improving the accuracy and information-richness of key and chord extraction from digital score data. It is argued that a greater sophistication in automatic harmony analysis is an important contribution to the field of computational musicology. Initial experiments use hidden Markov models to predict key and mod-ulation from automatically labelled chord sequences. Model parameters are based on heuristically formulated chord and key weightings derived from Schönberg’s harmonic theory and the key and chord ratings result-