Data-driven exploration of musical chord sequences

  • Authors:
  • Eric Nichols;Dan Morris;Sumit Basu

  • Affiliations:
  • Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA;Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA;Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

We present data-driven methods for supporting musical creativity by capturing the statistics of a musical database. Specifically, we introduce a system that supports users in exploring the high-dimensional space of musical chord sequences by parameterizing the variation among chord sequences in popular music. We provide a novel user interface that exposes these learned parameters as control axes, and we propose two automatic approaches for defining these axes. One approach is based on a novel clustering procedure, the other on principal components analysis. A user study compares our approaches for defining control axes both to each other and to an approach based on manually-assigned genre labels. Results show that our automatic methods for defining control axes provide a subjectively better user experience than axes based on manual genre labeling.