ISMIR-musicTheoryTutorial

This repository has slides and Jupyter notebooks for the ISMIR 2021 tutorial Scales, Chords, and Cadences: Practical Music Theory for MIR Researchers (https://ismir2021.ismir.net/tutorials/#3-scales-chords-and-cadences-practical-music-theory-for-mir-researchers)

Tutorial Bibliography

https://www.zotero.org/groups/4502273/ismir-musictheorytutorial

Tutorial Description

Much pitch-related MIR research builds either implicitly or explicitly on music-theoretic domain knowledge. Unfortunately, music theory is an esoteric discipline, with many of its canonical organizational principles presented in textbooks with dozens of classical musical examples and little indication of how these principles can be applied to other musical traditions. This tutorial will introduce fundamental pitch-related concepts in music theory for the ISMIR community and relate them to tasks associated with melodic, chord, and structural audio analysis for a range of musical styles. It will include sections on the scales, chords, and cadences routinely associated with Western art music of the common-practice tradition (~1650-1900), as well as non-Western folk musics and the popular music traditions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The three sections will be broken down as follows, with both lecture and hands-on coding demonstration components:

Scales

-Scale formation (octave equivalence, mathematical properties)

-Scale and mode types (western and non-Western)

-Implications for scale and key identification, automatic melody extraction

Chords

-Types (triads, seventh chords, extensions)

-Representation schemes (e.g., chord labeling)

-Syntactic principles (e.g., functional harmony, grammars)

-Implications for automatic chord recognition, pattern discovery

Cadences

-Types

-Linear/voice-leading patterns

-Relationship to large-scale formal types (phrases, themes, sonata, etc.)

-Implications for cadence discovery/classification, automatic segmentation

This tutorial will be of interest to a broad range of the ISMIR community, but will be of specific interest to MIR researchers with limited formal training in music theory. This workshop assumes a basic understanding of musical notation, but does not assume prior knowledge of Western music theory. It will be accessible to researchers new to the field, but will also be of interest to experienced researchers hoping to incorporate more music-theoretically based models into their research.