Describing Musical Contour with Tonality, Voicing, and Dissonance Levels

This project provides a quantitative way to describe the contours of musical pieces from the western classical music repertoire. These contours describe what happens in a piece of music over time according to some measurement: either a measurement of dissonance, spacing, or tonal strength. This project normalizes many of these individual contours and combines them to get an average contour over many pieces. By studying these aggregate contour, one can determine if a musical event or feature tends to occur more often at a specific point in a piece, for instance in the very middle. This project finds that there is some trend amongst levels of dissonance in the Bach Chorales, but it is inconclusive about trends in voice spacing and tonality.