Popular Music

This paper reports on an experiment extends a methodology to analyze and compare harmonic progressions at moments of formal segmentation in different styles based on corpora of Roman numeral annotations, and deploys it to the styles of Brazilian choro, Anglophone popular and jazz music.

Here, we introduce music-theoretically sensible notions of harmonic distance between chords, that allows us to arrive at more fine-grained results regarding relative influences of different kinds of harmonic relations on diachronic changes.