Chord Spacing and Quality: Lessons from Timbre Research
Video
(the video is a different presentation covering much of the same material; please cite the proceedings article below)
class CoAuthor
def __init__(self, name):
self.name = "Noah Kahrs"Format (When): Where
- Proceedings (2020) – Future Directions of Music Cognition
- Presentation (2020) – The Society for Music Theory
- Presentation (2020) – The Society for Music Theory, Math Interest Group
- Navigating the P-DFT Model: Subject-Data Correlations
- Presentation – Music Theory Society for New York State
TL;DR
Although chords are often represented by pitch-class (chroma) content in computational research, chord spacing is often a more salient feature. This paper addresses this disparity between models and cognition by extending the discrete fourierTransform (DFT) theory of chord quality from pitch-classes to pitches. In doing so, we note a structural similarity between music theory’s chord quality and audio engineering’s timbral cepstrum: both are DFTs, performed in the pitch or frequency domains, respectively. We thus treat chord spacing as a hybrid of pitch-class and timbre.
To investigate the potential benefits of the DFT on pitch space (P-DFT), we perform two computational experiments. The first explores the P-DFT model theoretically by correlating chord distances calculated with a pitch-class model against those calculated with spacing. The second compares P-DFT estimations of chord distances against listener responses (Kuusi, 2005). Our results show that spacing is a salient feature of chords, and that it can be productively described by timbre-influenced methods