HarmTrace : Automatic functional harmonic analysis

Music scholars have been intensively studying tonal harmony for centuries, yielding numerous theories and models. Unfortunately, a large number of these theories are formulated in a rather informal fashion and lack mathematical precision. In this article we present HarmTrace, a functional model of Western tonal harmony, which builds on well-known theories of tonal harmony. In contrast to many other theories which remain purely theoretical, we present an implemented system that is evaluated empirically. Given a sequence of symbolic chord labels, HarmTrace automatically derives the harmonic relations between chords. For this, we use advanced functional programming techniques which are uniquely available in the Haskell programming language. We show that our system is fast, easy to modify and maintain, is robust against noisy data, and returns harmonic analyses that comply with Western tonal harmony theory.

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