String-based methods for tonal harmony: A corpus study of Haydn's string quartets
This work addresses music-analytic questions for researchers in computational musicology, but it appears incremental as it adapts existing methods to a specific corpus.
The paper tackled the problem of analyzing tonal harmony in music by adapting string-based methods to discover musical organization, specifically applying Mandler's taxonomy to Haydn's string quartets to present evidence for principles like recurrence, syntax, and recursion.
This chapter considers how string-based methods might be adapted to address music-analytic questions related to the discovery of musical organization, with particular attention devoted to the analysis of tonal harmony. I begin by applying the taxonomy of mental organization proposed by Mandler (1979) to the concept of musical organization. Using this taxonomy as a guide, I then present evidence for three principles of tonal harmony -- recurrence, syntax, and recursion -- using a corpus of Haydn string quartets.