Pitch Distributions in Korean Court Music: Evidence Consistent with Tonal Hierarchies

Preliminary evidence from three recorded samples of music for p9iri suggests that a tonal hierarchy may exist in traditional Korean court music. After a simple transposition, two of the three works studied exhibited similar scale intervals, similar phrase-ending tones, and similar tone-duration distributions (or "key profiles"). A third sample work proved more equivocal. The results are consistent with earlier studies of Balinese music (Kessler, Hansen, & Shepard. 1984) and North Indian music (Castellano, Bharucha, & Krumhansl, 1984) concerning the existence of genre- related tonal hierarchies.