Using Harmonic and Melodic Analyses to Automate the Initial Stages of Schenkerian Analysis

Structural music analysis is used to reveal the inner workings of a musical composition by recursively applying reductions to the music, resulting in a series of successively more abstract views of the composition. Schenkerian analysis is the most well-developed type of structural analysis, and while there is a wide body of research on the theory, there is no well-defined algorithm to perform such an analysis. A automated algorithm for Schenkerian analysis would be extremely useful to music scholars and researchers studying music from a computational standpoint. The first major step in producing a Schenkerian analysis involves selecting notes from the composition in question for the primary soprano and bass parts of the analysis. We present an algorithm for this that uses harmonic and melodic analyses to accomplish this task.