Questioning the
average

Kris Shaffer, Ph.D.
CU–Boulder

kris.shaffermusic.com / @krisshaffer

view presentation at kris.shaffermusic.com/informaticsLT
fork presentation at github.com/kshaffer/informaticsLT

Problems with average transitional probability

• Getting to the average
• Average often does not match individual songs
• Average does not account for form (difference between modules; back-relating chords; etc.)
• Requires a corpus that shares a harmonic grammar

Study

• Assemble corpus
• Find individual song probability profiles
• Find average probability profile (multiple methods)
• Find individual and average profiles accounting for form
• Perform cluster analysis on all categories of profiles

Questions

• How many songs match the average?
• What changes when accounting for form?
• What songs, module types, etc. (do not) belong together? (clusters)