The Corelli trio sonatas are emblematic of the mid-Baroque period, characterized by their elegant melodies, intricate counterpoint, and systematic development of thematic material. Extending harmonic annotations from Hentschel et al. (2021), we provide a dataset with annotations of all 38 slow movements of the Sonate da chiesa Op. 1 (1681) and Op. 3 (1689), focusing on this Baroque writing style. The 7,000+ annotations describe the texture (homorhythmy, imitations, suspensions), further detailing thematic and imitation patterns, with other information such as rhythmic density. We provide audio synchronizations to a recording by the London Baroque Orchestra. We release the corpus for download as well as through the Dezrann platform.
Research on musical harmony has shown how some harmonies are perceived as more stable than others, and how this stability can be affected by other musical features. There is a gap in the research on how larger units of harmonies function together as a group. This study begins to investigate whether musical training can play a role in recognizing loop-based harmonic progressions, also known as musical schemata. In the first experiment, we presented participants with a chord progression and asked participants to select the answer choice with the matching chord progression that are paired with melodies, amongst four an-swer choices. In the second experiment, we reverse this and present participants with a chord progression and a melody and ask participants to select the answer choice with the matching chord progression. We found that all participants did well above chance and that musical training did have a slight effect on participants’ abilities to identify the looped-based har-monic progressions, while participants self-identity of their musical ability only was signif-icant for the first experiment. Taken together, these results suggest that the average listener is good at matching loop-based harmonic progressions, regardless of musical training.
The theory of Jesse Berezovsky (2019) is a rare foray of a physicist into the territory of music science. In their follow-up article in Empirical Musicology Review, Ryan Buechele, Alex Cooke, and Jesse Berezovsky (2024) show how the evolution of Western tuning systems and compositions can be rationalized by a theoretical model that describes a trade-off between minimizing sensory dissonance and maximizing compositional variety. From the Renaissance period onwards there was a trend towards more dissonance, and more compositional variety in both tuning systems and compositions. While this historical progression has perhaps been described qualitatively elsewhere, this model provides a more precise quantitative description of the phenomenon. The validity and scope of this model ought to be tested further by comparing its predictions with empirical measurements of tuning systems in both Western and non-Western cultures, alongside predictions of other theories of scale evolution. In the hope of encouraging and facilitating more of these interdisciplinary endeavors, I discuss some of my anecdotal experiences as a physical scientist embedded in the music science community, and offer advice on how to achieve better understanding and communication across disciplines.
