Evaluating the General Chord Type Representation in Tonal Music and Organising GCT Chord Labels in Functional Chord Categories
نویسندگان
چکیده
The General Chord Type (GCT) representation is appropriate for encoding tone simultaneities in any harmonic context (such as tonal, modal, jazz, octatonic, atonal). The GCT allows the re-arrangement of the notes of a harmonic sonority such that abstract idiom-specific types of chords may be derived. This encoding is inspired by the standard roman numeral chord type labelling and is, therefore, ideal for hierarchic harmonic systems such as the tonal system and its many variations; at the same time, it adjusts to any other harmonic system such as post-tonal, atonal music, or traditional polyphonic systems. In this paper the descriptive potential of the GCT is assessed in the tonal idiom by comparing GCT harmonic labels with human expert annotations (Kostka & Payne harmonic dataset). Additionally, novel methods for grouping and clustering chords, according to their GCT encoding and their functional role in chord sequences, are introduced. The results of both harmonic labelling and functional clustering indicate that the GCT representation constitutes a suitable scheme for representing effectively harmony in computational systems.
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