Historical Development of Tonal Syntax: Counting Pitch-Class Sets in 13th-16th Century Polyphonic Vocal Music
نویسندگان
چکیده
The evolution of tonal-harmonic syntax in European notated music, from the beginnings of polyphony to the emergence of majorminor tonality, has been the subject of intense historical study. Several authors have also attempted statistical analyses of the frequency of occurrence of specific pitch-time patterns in specific periods or composers. But no-one has compared prevalence profiles across different periods. Here, we estimate the frequency of occurrence of pitch-class sets of cardinality three in small samples of vocal polyphony from the 13, 14, 15 and 16 centuries. Throughout this period, sonorities that were later identified as major and minor became more prevalent (major more than minor). The rank order of sonorities was more variable in earlier music, where chords such as CDF or CEbF were quite prominent; in later music, the third and fourth most common chords were suspended and diminished.
منابع مشابه
An Empirical Approach to Studying Intonation Tendencies in Polyphonic Vocal Performances
Background in music theory and analysis. Polyphonic vocal intonation practices have been addressed in a number of studies on vocal acoustics. Our research both builds on this work and supplements it with a theoretical paradigm based on work done in the areas of sensory consonance and tonal attraction. Background in computing. Recent work in the field of music information retrieval has discussed...
متن کاملInstrumental Idiom in the 16th Century: Embellishment Patterns in Arrangements of Vocal Music
Much surviving 16th-century instrumental music consists of arrangements (‘intabulations’) of vocal music, in tablature for solo lute. Intabulating involved deciding what to omit from a score to fit the instrument, and making it fit under the hand. Notes were usually added as embellishments to the original plain score, using idiomatic patterns, typically at cadences, but often filling simple int...
متن کاملAutomatic Transcription of Polyphonic Vocal Music
This paper presents a method for automatic music transcription applied to audio recordings of a cappella performances with multiple singers. We propose a system for multi-pitch detection and voice assignment that integrates an acoustic and a music language model. The acoustic model performs spectrogram decomposition, extending probabilistic latent component analysis (PLCA) using a six-dimension...
متن کاملSequential Association Rules in Atonal Music
This paper describes a preliminary study on the structure of atonal music. In the same way as sequential association rules of chords can be found in tonal music, sequential association rules of pitch class set categories can be found in atonal music. It has been noted before that certain pitch class sets can be grouped into 6 different categories [10]. In this paper we calculate those categorie...
متن کاملSchematizing the Treatment of Dissonance in 16th-Century Counterpoint
We describe a computational project concerning labeling of dissonance treatments – schematic descriptions of the uses of dissonances. We use automatic score annotation and database methods to develop schemata for a large corpus of 16th-century polyphonic music. We then apply structural techniques to investigate coincidence of schemata, and to extrapolate from found structures to unused possibil...
متن کامل