Taking Form: A Representation Standard, Conversion Code, and Example Corpora for Recording, Visualizing, and Studying Analyses of Musical Form
Mark Gotham, Ireland, Matthew · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2019
We report on new specification standards for representing human analyses of musical form which enable musicians to represent their analytical view of a piece either on the score (where an encoded version is available) or on a spreadsheet. Both of these representations are simple, intuitive, and highly human-readable. Further, we provide code for converting between these formats, as well as a nested bracket representation adopted from computational linguistics which, in turn, can be visualised in familiar tree diagrams to provide 'at a glance' introductions to works. Finally, we provide an initial corpus of analyses/annotations in these formats, report on the practicalities of amassing them, and offer tools for automatic comparison of the works in the corpus based on the content and structure of the annotations. We intend for this resource to be useful to computational musicologists, enabling study of form at scale, and also useful pedagogically to all teachers, students, and appreciators of music from whom projects of this kind can be rather disconnected. The code and corpus can be found at https://github.com/MarkGotham/Taking-Form.