FluidHarmony: Defining an equal-tempered and hierarchical harmonic lexicon in the Fourier space
Gilberto Bernardes, Nádia Carvalho, Samuel Pereira · Journal of New Music Research · 2022
FluidHarmony is an algorithmic method for defining a hierarchical harmonic lexicon in equal temperaments.It utilizes an enharmonic weighted Fourier transform space to represent pitch class set (pcsets) relations.The method ranks pcsets based on user-defined constraints: the importance of interval classes (ICs) and a reference pcset.Evaluation of 5,184 Western musical pieces from the 16th to 20th centuries shows FluidHarmony captures 8% of the corpus's harmony in its top pcsets.This highlights the role of ICs and a reference pcset in regulating harmony in Western tonal music while enabling systematic approaches to define hierarchies and establish metrics beyond 12-TET.