Pitch scapes represent the musical content of different sections of a piece, concretely, how often a specific pitch class occurred in a section. Points at the bottom of the scape plot represent very short sections at that specific location; higher points represent larger sections; the top summarises the entire piece.
Pitch scapes can be visualised by using a key finding algorithm to colour each point according to the most likely key for that section. Figure 1 below shows such a key-scape plot for Johann Sebastian Bach’s Prelude in C major, BWV 846 (colour legend for keys at the bottom)
Using a statistical model for pitch scapes and modern machine learning techniques, we were able to extract a hierarchy of prototypical modulation plans from a large corpus of Baroque pieces (Johann Sebastian Bach, Georg Friedrich Händel, Domenico Scarlatti).
For more details, see our publication:
- Lieck R, Rohrmeier M (2020) Modelling Hierarchical Key Structure with Pitch Scapes. In: Proceedings of the 21st International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference. Montréal, Canada
Funding
The research presented here is generously supported by Claude Latour. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 760081 – PMSB.
