Automated Methods for Analyzing Music Recordings in Sonata Form

The sonata form has been one of the most important large-scale musical structures used since the early Classical period. Typically, the first movements of symphonies and sonatas follow the sonata form, which (in its most basic form) starts with an exposition and a repetition thereof, continues with a development, and closes with a recapitulation. The recapitulation can be regarded as an altered repeat of the exposition, where certain substructures (first and second subject groups) appear in musically modified forms. In this paper, we introduce automated methods for analyzing music recordings in sonata form, where we proceed in two steps. In the first step, we derive the coarse structure by exploiting that the recapitulation is a kind of repetition of the exposition. This requires audio structure analysis tools that are invariant under local modulations. In the second step, we identify finer substructures by capturing relative modulations between the subject groups in exposition and recapitulation. We evaluate and discuss our results by means of the Beethoven piano sonatas. In particular, we introduce a novel visualization that not only indicates the benefits and limitations of our methods, but also yields some interesting musical insights into the data.