While analysing large corpora of music, many of the questions that arise involve the proportion of some musical entity relative to one or more similar entities, for example, the relative proportions of tonic, dominant, and subdominant chords. Traditional statistical techniques, however, are fraught with problems when answering such questions. Compositional data analysis is a more suitable approach, based on sounder mathematical (and musicological) ground. This paper introduces some basic techniques of compositional data analysis and uses them to identify and illustrate changes in harmonic usage in American popular music as it evolved from the 1950s through the 1990s, based on the McGill Billboard data set of chord transcriptions.

Research on emotional responses to music indicates that prominent changes in instrumentation and timbre elicit strong responses in listeners. However, there are few theories related to orchestration that would assist in interpreting these empirical findings. This article investigates listeners’ emotional responses to four types of orchestral gestures – large-scale timbral and textural changes that occur in a coordinated, goal-directed manner – through an exploratory experiment that collected continuous responses of emotional intensity for musician and nonmusician listeners. A time series regression analysis was used to predict changes in emotional responses by modeling changes in several musical features, including instrumental texture, spectral centroid, loudness, and tempo. We demonstrate the application of a new visualization tool that compiles the emotional intensity ratings with score-based and performance-based musical features for qualitative and quantitative analysis. [...

This article explores the pitch structures developed by Nicola Vicentino in his 1555 treatise L’Antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica. I examine the rationale for his background gamut of 31 pitch classes, and document the relationships among his accounts of the genera, species, and modes, and between his and earlier accounts. Specially recorded and retuned audio examples illustrate some of the surviving enharmonic and chromatic musical passages.