Computer-aided musical theme analysis

Matevž Jekovec (2011) Computer-aided musical theme analysis. EngD thesis.

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Abstract

In this thesis we analyze the process of musicological systematic analysis of composition techniques in music scores. This process is difficult and can take several hours depending on the score length. In order to improve this process we propose a computer-supported theoretical model for analyzing melodic parts of the score. The core of this model comprises of notes linearization algorithm and a suffix tree of note pairs, which is transformed into a suffix tree of themes and motifs. We use this model to build the end-user application Harmonia which allows the import of music stored in different music file formats, motifs and themes analysis and visualization of the results of each analysis step. Later on we use the application to analyze J. S. Bach's fugues in Well-Tempered Clavier and improve musicological interpretation with important statistical information on melody and the structure, positions and evaluation of themes and motifs in the score. We also test the analysis algorithm to find the main themes in the given fugues using the theme evaluation function. We conclude that fugues in WTK are too heterogeneous for the test using the same approach and experimentally set parameters to be successful. We achieve 16.67 % accuracy.

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