The RomanText Format: A Flexible and Standard Method for Representing Roman Numerial Analyses

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.