Inproceedings,
Studying Tonal Evolution of Western Choral Music: A Corpus-Based Strategy
Proceedings of the Computational Humanities Research Conference (CHR), volume 3558 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings, page 687--702. Paris, France, (2023)
Abstract
The availability of large digital music archives combined with significant advances in computational analysis methods have enabled novel strategies for musicological corpus studies. This includes approaches based on audio recordings, which are available in large quantities for different musical works and styles. In this paper, we take up such an audio-based approach for studying the tonal complexity of music and its evolution over centuries. In particular, we examine the tonal evolution of Western choral and sacred music exploiting a novel audio corpus (5773 tracks) with a rich set of annotations. The data stems from one of the world’s leading music publisher for choral music, the Carus-Verlag, which is specialized on scholarly-critical sheet music editions of this repertoire and also runs an own record label. Based on this corpus, we revisit a heuristic strategy that exploits composer life dates to approximate work count curves over the years, validate this approximation strategy, and optimize its parameters using the reference composition years annotated in the Carus dataset. We then apply this strategy to derive evolution curves from the full Carus dataset. We compare the results to a study based on a purely instrumental dataset and test three hypotheses on tonal evolution, namely that (1) global complexity increases faster than local complexity, that (2) major keys are tonally more complex than minor keys, and that (3) instrumental music is more complex than vocal music. The results provide interesting insights into the choral music repertoire and suggest that well-curated publisher data constitutes a valuable resource for the computational humanities.
