Rameau: A system for automatic harmonic analysis

Automated harmonic analysis is an important and interesting music research topic. Although many researchers have studied solutions to this problem, there is no comprehensive and systematic comparison of the many techniques proposed. In this paper we present Rameau, a framework for automatic harmonic analysis we are developing. With Rameau we are able to reimplement and analyze previous techniques, and develop new ones as well. We present a performance evaluation of ten algorithms on a corpus of 140 Bach chorales. We also evaluate four of them using precision and recall and discuss possible improvements. We also present a numeric codification for tonal music with interesting properties, such as easy transposition, preservation of enharmonic information and easy conversion to standard pitch-class notation.

Conference paper