Characterisation of Harmony With Inductive Logic Programming

We present an approach for the automatic characterisation of the harmony of song sets making use of relational induction of logical rules. We analyse manually annotated chord data available in RDF and interlinked with web identifiers for chords which themselves give access to the root, bass, component intervals of the chords. We pre-process these data to obtain high-level information such as chord category, degree and intervals between chords before passing them to an Inductive Logic Programming software which extracts the harmony rules underlying them. This framework is tested over the Beatles songs and the Real Book songs. It generates a total over several experiments of 12,450 harmony rules characterising and differentiating the Real Book (jazz) songs and the Beatles’ (pop) music. Encouragingly, a preliminary analysis of the most common rules reveals a list of well-known pop and jazz patterns that could be completed by a more in depth analysis of the other rules.