The prevalent use of diatonic chord-loops in post-millennial pop music reflect the influence of electronic dance music (EDM) that became popular in the mainstream scene around the 2000s. Despite such shift in musical styles in post-millennial pop harmony, there is no centralized harmonic system that can effectively analyze tonal ambiuity, or lack of tonic(s) in chord-loop based songs.
In my dissertation, I propose a tonic-agnostic system suited for understanding post-millennial pop harmony, which is characterized by cyclic, diatonic chord-loops. In order support my theoretical model, I compiled pop harmony data from crowd-sourced chord transcriptions, published corpora from popular music field, and my own transcriptions through close listening.
See the dataset here.
. . . . . .
Popular Music Corpus Project connects existing symbolic datasets of popular music into a searchable, web-based database. Currently, publicly available popular music datasets are in many different formats, ranging from an excel spreadsheet to .musicXML, .krn, or even a text file that must be compiled through a C program. Many music scholars without a programming background cannot access these datasets, which prevents further scholarly discussion. Furthermore, relevant metadata of each songs—artist name, title, release date, producer names—are often missing, or inconsistently spelled. Harmonic data in these datasets are often encoded differently, which can result in conflicting analysis of the same repertoire. Such conflicting also prevents comparing or searching existing datasets efficiently.
UROPs worked with Jinny Park on automation of spell-checking metadata and updating missing metadata, querying MusicBrainz unique ID for each song based on artist name and song title. This project aims to culminate in an interactive website, where anyone can browse the database with a user-friendly interface, along with a public API that researchers can use.
Click here to view the prototype of the web app. Click here to view more details.