Investigating style evolution of Western classical music: A computational approach. Weiß, C., Mauch, M., Dixon, S., & Müller, M. Musicae Scientiae, 2018.
Investigating style evolution of Western classical music: A computational approach [link]Paper  doi  abstract   bibtex   
In musicology, there has been a long debate about a meaningful partitioning and description of music history regarding composition styles. Particularly, concepts of historical periods have been criticized since they cannot account for the continuous and interwoven evolution of style. To systematically study this evolution, large corpora are necessary suggesting the use of computational strategies. This article presents such strategies and experiments relying on a dataset of 2000 audio recordings, which cover more than 300 years of music history. From the recordings, we extract different tonal features. We propose a method to visualize these features over the course of history using evolution curves. With the curves, we re-trace hypotheses concerning the evolution of chord transitions, intervals, and tonal complexity. Furthermore, we perform unsupervised clustering of recordings across composition years, individual pieces, and composers. In these studies, we found independent evidence of historical periods...
@Article{          wei.ea2018-investigating,
    author       = {Wei{\ss}, Christof and Mauch, Matthias and Dixon, Simon
                   and M{\"{u}}ller, Meinard},
    year         = {2018},
    title        = {Investigating style evolution of Western classical music:
                   A computational approach},
    abstract     = {In musicology, there has been a long debate about a
                   meaningful partitioning and description of music history
                   regarding composition styles. Particularly, concepts of
                   historical periods have been criticized since they cannot
                   account for the continuous and interwoven evolution of
                   style. To systematically study this evolution, large
                   corpora are necessary suggesting the use of computational
                   strategies. This article presents such strategies and
                   experiments relying on a dataset of 2000 audio recordings,
                   which cover more than 300 years of music history. From the
                   recordings, we extract different tonal features. We
                   propose a method to visualize these features over the
                   course of history using evolution curves. With the curves,
                   we re-trace hypotheses concerning the evolution of chord
                   transitions, intervals, and tonal complexity. Furthermore,
                   we perform unsupervised clustering of recordings across
                   composition years, individual pieces, and composers. In
                   these studies, we found independent evidence of historical
                   periods...},
    doi          = {10.1177/1029864918757595},
    isbn         = {1029864918},
    issn         = {10298649},
    journal      = {Musicae Scientiae},
    keywords     = {composer style,computational musicology,corpus
                   analysis,music analysis with computers,music information
                   retrieval,style analysis,tonal audio features},
    mendeley-tags= {music analysis with computers},
    number       = {March},
    url          = {https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323619682_Investigating_style_evolution_of_Western_classical_music_A_computational_approach}
}

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