The romantext format: A flexible and standard method for representing roman numeral analyses

Dmitri Tymoczko, Mark Gotham, Michael Scott Cuthbert, Christopher Ariza

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

19 Scopus citations

Abstract

Roman numeral analysis has been central to the Western musician's toolkit since its emergence in the early nineteenth century: it is an extremely popular method for recording subjective analytical decisions about the chords and keys implied by a passage of music. Disagreements about these judgments have led to extensive theoretical debates and ongoing controversies. Such debates are exacerbated by the absence of a public corpus of expert Roman numeral analyses, and by the more fundamental lack of an agreed-upon, computer-readable syntax in which those analyses might be expressed. This paper specifies such a standard, along with an associated code library in music21, and a preliminary set of example corpora. To frame the project, we review some of the motivations for doing harmonic analysis, some reasons why it resists automation, and some prospective uses for our tools.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 20th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, ISMIR 2019
EditorsArthur Flexer, Geoffroy Peeters, Julian Urbano, Anja Volk
PublisherInternational Society for Music Information Retrieval
Pages123-129
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)9781732729919
StatePublished - 2019
Event20th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, ISMIR 2019 - Delft, Netherlands
Duration: Nov 4 2019Nov 8 2019

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 20th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, ISMIR 2019

Conference

Conference20th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, ISMIR 2019
Country/TerritoryNetherlands
CityDelft
Period11/4/1911/8/19

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Music
  • Information Systems

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'The romantext format: A flexible and standard method for representing roman numeral analyses'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this