On Local Keys, Modulations, and Tonicizations
Néstor Nápoles López, Laurent Feisthauer, Florence Levé, Ichiro Fujinaga · 2020
Throughout the common-practice period (1650–1900), it is customary to find changes of musical key within a piece of music. In current music theory terminology, the concepts of modulation and tonicization are helpful to explain many of these changes of key. Conversely, in computational musicology and music information retrieval, the preferred way to denote changes of key are local key features, which are oftentimes predicted by computational models. Therefore, the three concepts, local keys, modulations, and tonicizations describe changes of key. What is, however, the relationship between the local keys, modulations, and tonicizations of the same musical fragment?