Craig Stuart Sapp

Visual hierarchical key analysis

Tonal music is often conceived of as progressing through a sequence of key regions, usually starting and ending in the tonic key, with a journey away from the tonic key somewhere in the middle of the piece. This article presents a visual method of displaying the musical key structure of a composition in a single picture. The hierarchical plots can also show the relative strength of these key regions and how they develop out of the chordal substrate of the music.

Scoregram: displaying gross timbre information from a score

This paper introduces a visualization technique for music scores using a multi-timescale aggregation that offers at-a-glance information interpretable as the global timbre resulting from a normative performance of a score.

Historical development of tonal syntax: counting pitch-class sets in 13th-16th century polyphonic vocal music

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 13th, 14th, 15th and 16th 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 CEF were quite prominent; in later music, the third and fourth most common chords were suspended and diminished.