Towards a Harmonic Complexity of Musical Pieces

Music information retrieval (MIR) is small, but fast grow- ing discipline. It aims at extraction of relevant information from music in order to improve the work with multimedia information systems. A popular approach in MIR is to apply signal processing techniques to ex- tract low-level features from a musical piece. However, in order to create helpful applications, high-level concepts, such as music harmony, need to be examined as well. In this paper, we present a new model for un- derstanding music harmony in computer systems. The proposed model takes the challenge of lling the gap between music theory and mathe- matical structures. Inspired by the computational complexity, we then derive a new term, harmonic complexity, that can be evaluated for a musical piece, and we test it on a genre classication problem.