Estimating the Tonalness of Transpositional Type Pitch-Class Sets Using Learned Tonal Key Spaces

This paper proposes a method to estimate the tonalness of a pitchclass set using transpositional types. For each set under consideration the method uses the corresponding transpositional type to generate note collections from acoustical instrument sounds and subsequently calculates a learned projection of that set into a low-dimensional space. The structure in this representation is then compared to the structure of a low-dimensional tonal key space learned from audio recordings of labeled tonal music. The term tonalness refers to how strongly the input suggests congruence to pitch use distributions in common-practice tonality. The method is tested on pitch-class sets of cardinality 3 and compared with measures from other work.