Diachronic Modeling of Tonal Coherence on the Tonnetz Across Classical and Popular Repertoires
For computational music analysis and generation, this offers interpretable dimensions to distinguish tonal styles, though the contribution is incremental as it extends existing Tonnetz-based methods.
The authors propose a two-dimensional model of tonal coherence based on the Tonnetz, measuring tonal focus and tonal connection. Analyzing over 2,800 pieces, they find that popular music has higher tonal focus while classical music has higher tonal connection, providing quantitative evidence for stylistic differences.
How do different musical traditions achieve tonal coherence? Most computational measures to date have analysed tonal coherence in terms of a single dimension, whereas a multi-dimensional analyses have not been sufficiently explored. We propose a new model drawing on the concept of the Tonnetz -- we define two partially independent measures: \emph{tonal focus}, the concentration of pitch content near a tonal center; and \emph{tonal connection}, the degree to which pitch content reflects structured intervallic pathways back to that center. Analyzing over 2,800 pieces from Western classical and popular traditions, we find that these traditions occupy overlapping yet distinguishable regions of the two-dimensional space. Popular music shows higher tonal focus, while classical music exhibits higher tonal connection. Our complementary measures ground the differences between different tonal styles in quantitative evidence, and offer interpretable dimensions for computational music analysis and controllable generation.