Modeling Musical Structure
Anthony Pople · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2004
This chapter discusses the application of formal analytical approaches to individual musical works. Serious attempts to formalize, and to even to automate, the process of analysis go back to the 1980s, and have important empirical consequences: once a method is formalized, it becomes possible to apply it in a systematic and uniform manner and from this to discover what the empirical consequences of the approach really are. A range of approaches to which this applies is surveyed (from methods based on artificial intelligence to neural nets), including the work of Winograd, Tenney, Gjerdingen, and Temperley. The chapter ends with consideration of Pople's own “Tonalities” software, which represents an empirical means by which analysts can become increasingly aware of the consequences of their intuitions concerning a piece's structure.