Data and Code for "Exploring the foundations of tonality: Statistical cognitive modeling of modes in the history of Western classical music"

This repository contains the data and code necessary to reproduce the results for our paper "Exploring the foundations of tonality: Statistical cognitive modeling of modes in the history of Western classical music", published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.

• Link to paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-00678-6

Files

Data

• pitch_class_distributions.csv contains the year, the root and mode (if given in the metadata), and the relative frequencies of the pitch classes in the respective piece, weighted by duration
• bayesian_predictions.csv contains the historical period (0 to 4 from Renaissance to Late-Romantic), the estimated root, and the mode prediction of our Bayesian mode classifier
• templates.csv contains the (average) pitch class profiles ("key profiles") from different sources as described in the paper

Code

To reproduce our results and figures, first run the python_notebook.ipnb until you are asked to run the julia_notebook.ipynb. After running the latter completely, return to the Python notebook execute the remaining cells.

Authors

Daniel Harasim (daniel.harasim@epfl.ch), Fabian C. Moss, Matthias Ramirez, and Martin Rohrmeier

Citation

Harasim, D., Moss, F. C., Ramirez, M., & Rohrmeier, M. (2020). Exploring the foundations of tonality: Statistical cognitive modeling of modes in the history of Western classical music. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.

BibTex

@article{Harasim2021,
	author = {
		Harasim, Daniel and 
		Moss, Fabian C. and 
		Ramirez, Matthias and 
		Rohrmeier, Martin
		},
	title = {
		Exploring the foundations of tonality: 
		Statistical cognitive modeling of modes 
		in the history of Western classical music
		},
	journal = {Humanities and Social Sciences Communications},
	volume = {8},
	number = {5}
	year = {2021},
	doi = {10.1057/s41599-020-00678-6}
}

License

All configuration files and all files that contain programming code are under GPLv3 license that is written in the file LICENSE_GPL.txt. This includes in particular files with a name extension of .jl, .toml, and .ipynb.

All other files are under CCv4 BY-NC-SA license that is written in the file LICENSE_CC.md. This includes in particular files with a name extension of .csv, .txt, and .pdf.

If you use any of the code or data from this repository in your own work, please provide a reference to our research paper as specified above.

Funding statement

This project has received partial funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 760081 – PMSB. It was also partially funded through the Swiss National Science Foundation within the project "Distant Listening – The Development of Harmony over Three Centuries (1700–2000)". We thank Claude Latour for supporting this research through the Latour Chair in Digital Musicology. We want to express our gratefulness towards the owners of ClassicalArchives, in particular Pierre R. Schwob, for making the data available for our research.