Harmonic Analysis of Jazz MIDI Files Using Statistical Parsing Music and Machine Learning Workshop, Edinburgh

Harmonic analysis involves identifying hierarchical structure, similar to that found in the syntax and semantics of language, in the harmonic progressions underlying tonal melodies. In previous work, we have used grammar-based parsing, with related machine-learning techniques, for automatic harmonic analysis of jazz chord sequences. We now turn to the harder task of harmonic analysis of jazz MIDI performances using similar techniques. First, we evaluate a strict pipeline approach: we use an HMM to perform chord recognition and our previous system to analyze the output. Then, we use the chord recognizer to propose a chord lattice and analyze this using an adaptation of the previous system.