Questioning theaverage

Kris Shaffer, Ph.D.CU–Boulder

kris.shaffermusic.com / @krisshafferview presentation at kris.shaffermusic.com/informaticsLTfork presentation at github.com/kshaffer/informaticsLT

Is average transitional probability a musically and statistically meaningful way to account for harmonic syntax?

Problems with average transitional probability

• Getting to the average
• Average often does not match individual songs
• Average does not account for form (difference between modules; back-relating chords; etc.)
• Requires a corpus that shares a harmonic grammar

Study

• Assemble corpus
• Find individual song probability profiles
• Find average probability profile (multiple methods)
• Find individual and average profiles accounting for form
• Perform cluster analysis on all categories of profiles

Questions

• How many songs match the average?
• What changes when accounting for form?
• What songs, module types, etc. (do not) belong together? (clusters)

Blog posts

• Problems with using transitional probability in musical corpus studies
• Averages, clusters, and hidden patterns
• Rock corpus comparison
• Harmonic syntax in corpus studies Python scripts and test corpus available on GitHub

This presentation is copyright ©2013 Kris Shaffer and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.