Tonalities

Influences between music tradition over centuries

Tonalities is developing tools for the modal-tonal identification, exploration, and classification of monophonic and polyphonic notated music from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. This pilot has a broader societal and pedagogical dimension: it not only impacts research on the theory and evolution of musical languages but is also relevant for the understanding of music collections by students, performers, and informed music lovers.

The study of the modal-tonal organisation of European music is crucial for comprehending its structural properties, inner coherence, dramatic plot and, ultimately, artistic meaning. Research over the past decades has led to a closer understanding of the tonal system in the so-called common practice period (c. 1650-1900). However, the underlying structure of modal music and music that neither belongs to modality nor is part of the tonal system remains largely unknown.

Tonalities is building on previous studies that relate musical systems to their history (Dahlhaus 1968), grant early music other conditions of truth than tonality (Wiering 2001), and make use of statistical methods (Meeùs 2003). Embracing the open linked data paradigm, the pilot references large corpora of music made available in digital score libraries and explores them through a quantitative-qualitative approach that consists of modelling different theories – historical or contemporary, specific or general – and applying them to musical works through a dedicated interface combining machine learning and human annotations. It thus becomes possible to grasp how distinct theoretical viewpoints bring to light different – sometimes conflicting – musical properties; confront different analytical interpretations; look “inside” both theories and works; understand how both evolve in time in relation to each other; and, ultimately, provide a reasoned, documented, and authored modal-tonal classification of musical pieces.

In addition to external score libraries (Josquin Project, CRIM, Measuring Polyphony, Gesualdo Online, The Lost Voices Project), Tonalities is relying on the NEUMA score library, central to the Facets pilot, as well as the corpora produced and explored by Tunes and Interlink. The modelling of music theories is conducted in close connection with WP2. The extraction of musical patterns undertaken in Tonalities (cadences, melodic formulas, harmonic progressions, etc.) has strong affinities with WP3.

Pilot leader:

Christophe Guillotel-Nothmann (CNRS-IReMus)

Recent News

Polifonia’s TONALITIES develops tools for the modal-tonal identification. Pilot leader Christophe Guillotel-Nothmann explains the ambition of the pilot that evolves around musical pattern extractions on our YouTube channel.

On Polifonia's YouTube channel, we publish a series of videos about the pilots and work packages. This…

15 March 2023

Peter van Kranenburg (Meertens Institute, KNAW), pilot leader of ORGANS and TUNES, is part of the upcoming AVA_Net webinar on connecting music collections.

Peter van Kranenburg (Meertens Institute, KNAW), pilot leader of ORGANS and TUNES, is part of the upcoming…

6 March 2023

The rich culture of Italian bells and bell towers is captured by Polifonia’s BELLS. Pilot leader Elena Musumeci explains this ambition in our latest YouTube video:
#bells #belltowers #heritage #tangibleheritage #italianculture

The bell tower is certainly one of the architectural elements that best characterize the Italian landscape.…

15 February 2023

Recently, the ORGANS pilot released a press statement about its ambitions in order to reach all pipe organ enthusiasts about the upcoming Knowledge Graph on organ history. Also, the stakeholder network video is now on our YouTube channel, in which pilitor leader Peter van Kranenburg explains the work being done in this pilot.

Recently, the ORGANS pilot released a press statement about its ambitions in order to reach all pipe…

17 January 2023

Associazione Campanari Liguri with the cooperation of Polifonia, MiC, ICCD, Soprintendenza Archeologia Belle Arti e Paesaggio per la città metropolitana di Genova e la provincia di La Spezia are organising a bell concert at the church of San Pietro Apostolo, Avegno (Italy). This is the first of a series of concerts that will be part of, and inspired by our BELL pilot.

Associazione Campanari Liguri with the cooperation of Polifonia, MiC, ICCD, Soprintendenza Archeologia…

6 September 2022

Mari Wigham and Philo van Kemenade from Sound & Vision investigate how graph representations can help users of the CLARIAH Media Suite in their search within music collections.

Mari Wigham and Philo van Kemenade from Sound & Vision investigate how graph representations can…

8 April 2022

Check out the special itinerary dedicated to historical bells in Italy

On the Italian website of the catalogue of cultural heritage there is an itinerary dedicated to the…

25 March 2022

UK NCACE awarded funding for supporting the ACCESS workshops led by Simon Holland and The Stables

Polifonia’s ACCESS pilot lead by Simon Holland and The Stables in Milton Keynes were selected for…

3 February 2022

Elena Musumeci and Chiara Veninata visited the 1000 years old Marinelli bell foundry

The village of  Agnone is a small Italian town in  Molise also known as “The city of bells”. Here,…

30 December 2021
David Leeuw with his Family, 1671. Rijksmuseum |PD

Helen Barlow explains the relevance children’s experience of music in the past and how to find the historical evidence for it

Music and Childhood is one of ten pilots in the Polifonia research project into European musical heritage,…

23 July 2021

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