Group Amphora Research Group Steering Committee Program Committee Organizing Committee Exploiting Html5 Technologies for Distributed Parasitic Web Storge . . . 71 towards a Harmonic Complexity of Musical Pieces towards a Harmonic Complexity of Musical Pieces

Music information retrieval (MIR) is small, but fast growing discipline. It aims at extraction of relevant information from music in order to improve the work with multimedia information systems. A popular approach in MIR is to apply signal processing techniques to extract low-level features from a musical piece. However, in order to create helpful applications, high-level concepts, such as music harmony, need to be examined as well. In this paper, we present a new model for understanding music harmony in computer systems. The proposed model takes the challenge of filling the gap between music theory and mathematical structures. Inspired by the computational complexity, we then derive a new term, harmonic complexity, that can be evaluated for a musical piece, and we test it on a genre classification problem.