Empirical Musicology Review Vol. 11, No.

1, 2016

Big Data, Big Questions:

A Closer Look at the YaleClassical Archives Corpus (c. 2015)
TREVOR de CLERCQ[1]
Middle Tennessee State University

ABSTRACT: This paper responds to the article by Christopher White and Ian Quinn,
in which these authors introduce the Yale-Classical Archives Corpus (YCAC). I begin
by making some general observations about the corpus, especially with regard to
ramifications of the keyboard-performance origins of many pieces in the original MIDI
collection. I then assess the accuracy of the scale-degree and local-key fields in the
database, which were generated by the Bellman-Budge key-finding algorithm. I point
out that some of the inaccuracies from the key-finding algorithms output may
influence the results we obtain from statistical studies of this corpus. I also offer an
alternative analysis to the authors finding that the ratio of V7 to V chords increases
over time in common-practice music. Specifically, I conjecture that this finding may be
the result of (or related to) increasing instrumental resources over time. I close with
some recommendations for future versions of the corpus, such as enabling end users to
help repair transcription errors as well as offer ground truths for harmonic analyses and
key area information.

Submitted 2015 December 13; accepted 2016 February 8.

KEYWORDS: corpus analysis, key-finding, modulation, tonality, machine learning

IN the current issue of this journal, Christopher White and Ian Quinn provide an overview of the Yale-
Classical Archives Corpus (YCAC)a massive collection of CSV data files derived from user-generated
MIDI encodings of more than 14,000 works, spanning from the 1500s to the late 20th century and
representing a broad range of Western classical music styles. A corpus of classical music this large
promises to be a valuable resource for empirical researchers hoping to answer big questions in this age of
big data. After describing some of the technical aspects of the corpus (e.g., data fields, metadata), the
authors give an overview of some of its general properties. Perhaps not surprisingly, for example, most
works are of German-Austrian origin (e.g., Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven). The authors then describe some
limitations and idiosyncrasies of the corpus, and they finish with a sample study. In their sample study, the
authors show that the ratio of V7 to V chords increases over time, generally speaking, implying that
composers in later centuries seem to have preferred V7 chords over regular V chords more than did
composers from earlier centuries.
After reading the article and looking closely at the corpus, I believe some additional points are
worth noting for any researcher interested in using this corpus as it currently stands. In what follows, I
provide some general observations of the corpus that expand upon those discussed by White and Quinn. I
also consider the value of four related fields in the corpus (those dealing with local key and local scale
degree), which are automatically generated by a key-finding algorithm. I go on to offer alternative
interpretations of some of the authors findings, including the distribution of scale-degree sets and the ratio
of triads to seventh chords. Finally, I outline some recommendations that, while requiring time and labor to
implement, would improve the corpus and increase its value to the empirical musicology community.

SOME GENERAL OBSERVATIONS

To understand this corpus and its possibilities, it seems prudent to inspect the raw data. One hardly knows
where to begin with a corpus of almost 14,000 pieces, so I decided to simply look at the first piece in the
first file in the first folder: the Courante from J. S. Bachs English Suite no. 2 in A minor, BWV 807. I have
reproduced the first bar of the original score (including the anacrusis) in Figure 1 below. The corresponding

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Empirical Musicology Review Vol. 11, No. 1, 2016

data from the first two fields in the corpus are shown in Table 1[2]. In Table 1, each row represents a new
salami slice (i.e., the addition or subtraction of a pitch from the texture); the left-hand column represents
the offset in quarter notes from the beginning of piece; and the right-hand column represents the pitch
content itself. (The Chord field, which is the label found in the corpus, is what I assume the authors refer
to as the RawPitchTuple field in their article.)

3 j j

& 2

{

?3 #
2
Figure 1. J. S. Bach, English Suite no. 2 in A minor, BWV 807, Courante, m. 1.

Table 1. The first two fields (offset and Chord) from the YCAC, which correspond to the first bar
(including the anacrusis) of the Courante from J. S. Bachs English Suite no. 2 in A minor, BWV 807.

offset Chord
0 <music21.chord.Chord A4>
0.5 <music21.chord.Chord C4 E4 A4 A3>
1.25 <music21.chord.Chord C4 E4 A4>
1.5 <music21.chord.Chord C4 E4 A4 E3>
1.75 <music21.chord.Chord E3>
2 <music21.chord.Chord B4 E3>
2.25 <music21.chord.Chord B4>
2.5 <music21.chord.Chord C5 A2>
2.875 <music21.chord.Chord A2>
3 <music21.chord.Chord D5 A2>
3.25 <music21.chord.Chord D5>
3.5 <music21.chord.Chord E5 A3>
3.875 <music21.chord.Chord A3>
4 <music21.chord.Chord F5 A3>
4.25 <music21.chord.Chord F5>
4.5 <music21.chord.Chord E5 G#3>
4.875 <music21.chord.Chord G#3>
5 <music21.chord.Chord D5 G#3>
5.25 <music21.chord.Chord D5>
5.5 <music21.chord.Chord C5 E3>
5.875 <music21.chord.Chord E3>
6 <music21.chord.Chord B4 E3>
6.25 <music21.chord.Chord B4>

When we compare the corpus encoding in Table 1 to the music notation in Figure 1, a few issues
are quickly apparent. To begin with, we can see here, as White and Quinn openly admit in their article, that
the corpus does not contain much useful metric information. For example, the downbeat of bar 1 occurs at
offset 0.5 due to the eighth-note pickup. Integer values in the corpus, therefore, may or may not represent
strong beats. Additionally, the use of a quarter note as the standard offset, which in this case is only half a
beat given the 3/2 meter, makes the raw data in the corpus somewhat difficult (although not impossible) to
compare manually with the score[3]. Measure numbers have to be calculated knowing the meter and pickup
length for each individual work, and unfortunately, no meter information is included in the metadata file or
the pitch data files. The lack of usable metrical information is a serious lacuna, in my opinion, and severely
limits what can be done with this corpus as it currently stands. That said, the authors are upfront about this
issue, and there are ways to remediate it, as I discuss below.

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Empirical Musicology Review Vol. 11, No. 1, 2016

A second issue can be found with the event at offset 1.25. At this moment in the piece, the corpus
encodes a new event occurring on the sixteenth note before the second quarter note of bar 1. At first glance,
an event at this location seems rather odd, since the notes on the downbeat of bar 1 all last a quarter note or
longer. This event (C4, E4, A4) is, I would guess, the result of a human piano player lifting his or her left
hand from the note A3 in the bass to the note E3 in the bass, which results in a recorded duration for the
first bass note of only a dotted-eighth note instead of a full quarter note. The event at offset 1.25, therefore,
represents a spurious simultaneity, generated by the mechanics of piano performance. These types of
spurious simultaneities continue throughout this one-bar excerpt (and the piece as a whole), creating
upwards of twice as many salami slices as necessary. (The excerpt in Figure 1 should only have 12 salami
slices, by my calculation, instead of the 23 listed in Table 1.) These are not pitch errors, per se, but they are
misrepresentations of the notated score, if one assumes the salami slices are meant to represent the original
score faithfully. It is somewhat more difficult, for example, to track the bass line correctly or judge chord
inversions, since a low bass part is not consistently reflected in the salami slices despite its presence in the
score.
To repair these spurious simultaneities would not be impossible. For example, a researcher could
import the original MIDI file into a digital audio workstation (DAW), such as Avid Pro Tools, and then
quantize the note off events to an eighth-note grid. This process would have to be carefully done, though,
since this particular composition includes a few sixteenth notes and mordents (performed as 32nd notes),
which would require a different quantization level. Importing the MIDI file into a DAW would also allow
the researcher to correct any meter problems; but this repair process would have to be done on a file-by-file
basis, which would require a significant amount of time for even a portion of a corpus this size. Files that
were originally encoded via MIDI-keyboard performances could be excluded from the corpus, as the
authors mention, but as of yet there is no clear or easy way to do so.
The fact that many pieces were encoded via MIDI-keyboard performances impacts the corpus in at
least one other important way. Specifically, I would estimate that the corpus as a whole has a strong
sampling bias towards keyboard and piano works. This aspect can be seen in Figure 4 of the authors
article, which shows that the two most common genres in the corpus are SoloSonata and OtherSolo. In
the SoloSonata genre, for instancewhich includes 1,208 unique entries in the metadata fileonly 47
pieces by my count are for an instrument other than piano, organ, or harpsichord. A similarly lopsided
distribution (although not as dramatic) can be found in the OtherSolo genre, of which about 80% of the
1,162 unique entries in the metadata file are for a keyboard instrument, and about 80% of the remaining
20% turn out to be for guitar. To be clear, the corpus does include many symphonic and orchestral works.
All nine of Beethovens symphonies have been encoded, for example. But for J. S. Bach, who is the
second-most well-represented composer after Mozart in terms of number of pieces in the corpus, neither
the Orchestral Suites (BWV 10661069) nor the Brandenburg Concertos (BWV 10461051) are included,
notable omissions to be sure. In fairness, White and Quinn state clearly that their corpus represents only the
priorities of a particular group of music aficionadosindividuals who were dedicated to converting notated
scores into MIDI information and then posting it on the web. That said, we should keep these sampling
biases in mind, as they potentially impact the inferences we make from this data.

ON THE VALUE OF THE LOCAL KEY AND SCALE DEGREE FIELDS

Because the corpus lacks any information about meter, and since meter provides the necessary context for
rhythm, it would be difficult to say much of value about rhythmic aspects of the corpus, at least as the
corpus currently stands. Our analytical attention, therefore, would seem to have to be directed primarily to
the domain of pitch. Like meter for rhythm, tonality provides the context for pitch (at least for the vast
majority of the musical works included in this corpus). In other words, it would be difficult to say much of
value about the pitch content of this corpus without reference to a key. Accordingly, the authors and their
assistants have encoded the global key of each work in the metadata file. But the global key does not
provide much meaningful context either, since modulation is a common feature of common-practice-era
music. To give the raw pitch data some meaningful context, therefore, the authors encode at each salami
slice the local tonic and mode (major or minor). From this local key information, the authors can generate a
representation of the local scale-degree content of the salami slice (reported as LocalSDNormalOrder in
their paper, though labeled as LocalSDForm_BassSD in the corpus itself, since it also indicates which
scale degree is in the bass). The local key information is generated by the Bellman-Budge key-finding

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Empirical Musicology Review Vol. 11, No. 1, 2016

algorithm (Bellman, 2006; Budge, 1943), and another field also reports the confidence level (specifically, a
correlation coefficient varying from 0 to 1, with 1 being the highest confidence).
It is worth examining the output from this key-finding algorithm in more detail, since it forms the
basis of the pitch context in the corpus. Again, I chose to examine the first piece in the first file in the first
folder of the corpus (the Courante from J. S. Bachs English Suite no. 2 in A minor, BWV 807). The
opening 12 bars of score, along with the output from the key-finding algorithm, are shown below in Figure
2. (The reader is encouraged at this point to play through or listen to the piece, noting how well the output
from the key-finding algorithm reflects his or her hearing.)

M j
3 j j m # n
&2 J #

{ J
? 23 # # J n

m m
A min
4
m
& J# # J
r
J

{ ?


J # # nn
b

M
F maj
b
A min

m

7

& J
J J

{ ?

n
F maj


C maj


j

J

10
m j m
& j j b n J

{C maj

?
D min




C maj

Ambiguous

Figure 2. J. S. Bach, English Suite no. 2 in A minor, BWV 807, Courante, mm. 112, showing the key
areas as encoded in the YCAC by the Bellman-Budge key-finding algorithm.

To my ear, this piece begins in A minor, modulates to C major somewhere around the downbeat of
bar 6, and stays in C major until the double bar at the end of m. 12. The key-finding algorithm correctly
identifies the opening and ending keys, but in contrast to my hearing, it posits a move to F major around the
end of bar 5 until the the B-natural in the bass near the end of bar 7, as well as a move to D minor in bar 10
(which is preceded by an ambiguous span of two eighth notes). The modulation to D minor seems like a
clear error on the part of the key-finding algorithm, influenced presumably by the B-flat near the end of bar
10. The move to F major, though, is somewhat understandable, since the IV chord is heavily tonicized
during this passage. Nonetheless, the key-finding algorithm does not reflect my personal understanding of
the scale-degree content of these 12 bars very well. Overall, I would say it only labels about 75% of the
local keys correctly (9 out of 12 bars), assuming one takes my hearing as the correct hearing.
In all fairness, had I been presented with the material that the algorithm labels as F major
(especially the latter half of bar 6 and the first half of bar 7) in isolation, I would have undoubtedly labeled
it as F major myself. The problem is that the key-finding algorithm has no knowledge of key hierarchies or
tonicization, or expectations about key relationships in works from this era. (This is not the authors fault,

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Empirical Musicology Review Vol. 11, No. 1, 2016

of course, but just the nature of current key-finding algorithms.) Instead, the algorithm is simply trying to
find the best fit for a set of idealized scale-degree distributions across a sliding set of eight windows. (See
the authors original article for more information on the exact process.) The specific scale-degree
distributions for the algorithm are given in Bellman (2006, p. 82), where one can see that the scale degrees
of the tonic chord (in either a major or minor key) receive the highest three weightings. As a result, we can
predict that the key-finding algorithm will have the tendency to interpret any given measure as containing
tonic. It is no surprise, therefore, that the tonicization of F major is interpreted as a key change.
To better assess the operation of the key-finding algorithm, I thought it would be worthwhile to
examine another composition in the corpus. I chose next to look at the first piece in the second file in the
first folder: movement 2 from Beethovens Piano Sonata no. 26, op. 81a. As it turns out, this particular
piece is quite thorny with regard to key areas. For example, while the global tonic of the piece is ostensibly
C minor, there are only four bars at the beginning (mm. 5-8), a brief moment in the middle (the last half of
m. 20), and four bars at the end (mm. 37-40) that are clearly in C minor, at least to my ears. Assessing the
accuracy of the key-finding algorithm in this highly chromatic and modulatory setting seemed somewhat
unfair. Accordingly, I moved on to the second piece in the second file in the first folder: the third
movement from the same work (Beethoven Piano Sonata no. 26, op. 81a). The first few bars of this
movement are reproduced below in Figure 3.

b 6
& b b8 J b

{
n
b6 j ?
f

& b b8
&


'
Figure 3. Beethoven Piano Sonata, no. 26, op. 81a, III, mm. 13.

For those readers unfamiliar with this piece, it is worth noting that the arpeggiation of what is an
obvious dominant-seventh chord continues for the first 10 bars of the movement, followed by the first
instance of the E-flat major tonic on the downbeat of bar 11. Unfortunately, because the key-finding
algorithm prefers a scale-degree distribution that maps the most frequently-occurring scale-degrees to a
tonic chord, the first seven and a half measures of the piece are analyzed as in B-flat major. The key-
finding algorithm does get on track, however, by the middle of bar 8. The music stays in E-flat major for
about the next 26 bars (up until bar 36 or so), and the key-finding algorithm does label these bars correctly
as in E-flat major since there is only a bit of brief tonicization via a few V/ii chords, none of which last
longer than a single beat. The situation gets somewhat more complicated around bar 36, however, as the
music modulates to the dominant key area of B-flat major. I have reproduced the transition passage below
in Figure 4, which includes the key areas encoded in the YCAC by the Bellman-Budge algorithm.
As I hear this passage, the music fairly abruptly switches to B-flat major on the downbeat of bar
37; bars 3840 outline what is essentially an augmented sixth chord in B-flat, which resolves to V in bars
4144; the augmented sixth chord then returns for bars 4548, followed again by V in bars 4952, after
which we arrive at our new theme in bar 53, which is clearly in B-flat major. As Figure 4 shows, the key-
finding algorithm tends to identify changing keys instead of changing chords. The prolonged augmented
sixth chord (admittedly, missing its characteristic augmented sixth until the last eighth-note of bar 48)
proves to be a serious challenge for the key-finding algorithm. Although the algorithm does analyze some
of bars 3752 as having a B-flat tonic (albeit, in a minor mode), it often defaults to labeling each prolonged
chord as tonic itself.
Overall, given the first 55 measures of this work, I assess the key-finding algorithm to assign key
areas correctly for only about 65% of the passage. I have some questions and concerns, therefore, regarding
the value and accuracy of the local key and local scale-degree fields in the corpus. This apparent
shortcoming is not the authors fault, of course. We are simply encountering the inherent limitations and
problems with a correlation-based distributional key-finding algorithm. Improved key-finding performance
might be attained with a probabilistic distributional key-finding algorithm, as described in Temperley
(2007), which reportedly achieves a success rate of around 85% at the local level. But as of yet, no known
key-finding algorithm exists that can consistently model how a trained human listener would hear key

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Empirical Musicology Review Vol. 11, No. 1, 2016

structures in a classical work. (An effective key-finding algorithm would presumably require more
knowledge than solely scale-degree distributions, such as knowledge about typical harmonic progressions,
meter, melodic phrasing, etc. This also assumes, rather naively, that two trained human listeners will
analyze the local keys of a piece of music in the same way, which is doubtful given a large set of
compositions [see de Clercq & Temperley, 2011 and Temperley & de Clercq, 2013].)

n b
b 3
34
6
3
b
& b8
n

{
? bb 68


3

b
Eb major
b
b b sf b b n n
37

&b b . b.

{
sf '
b b b sf sf. sf n ' sfn sf sf sfn sf sf
sf
' sf
sf
? bb b b.
b n &
n
' Eb major Gb major ' F major
b j
j
j n b b b j
j
n b j b b j
b
45

b b J J J J J J b
& b J

{

b
p

& b b bb bb bb bb n

Gb major Bb minor
n b j n j
b j
n b n J
j
J n J b n J bj n #
j j
b b
49
J J
&b b J

J J
{ b
&b b
n n n n
Bb major
j ?b

Bb minor F major

b n
53

& b b b n
n

{ ? bb
b
j
Bb major
j


j j
j j


j
j

Figure 4. Beethoven Piano Sonata, no. 26, op. 81a, III, mm. 3456, showing the key areas as encoded in
the YCAC by the Bellman-Budge key-finding algorithm.

Until a more accurate key-finding algorithm is developed (see Temperley [2012] for a recent
overview of the field), we should be very careful about drawing inferences from any results derived from a
computer-generated scale-degree analysis of a large body of musical works. In Figure 5 of their article, for
example, White and Quinn report the most frequent scale-degree sets found in the YCAC, transposed to C
major. As this figure shows, the tonic chord is the most frequent. In fact, seven of the top-ten scale-degree
sets can be viewed as subsets of the tonic chord. (The other three scale-degree sets in the top ten, perhaps
not surprisingly, are subsets of the dominant chord.) But if the key-finding algorithm has the tendency to
read any prolonged passage as a tonic harmony instead of a chromatic harmony, then we should not be
surprised if the corpus appears to be mostly tonic subsets[4]. The results shown in the authors Figure 5,
therefore, may simply be reflecting (or at least, strongly shaped by) the original distribution of the key-
finding algorithm itself.

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 Empirical Musicology Review Vol. 11, No. 1, 2016

AN ALTERNATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE SAMPLE CASE

If the rhythmic information in the corpus cannot be analyzed because there is no metric context, and the
pitch information is problematic because the encoded tonal context is often suspect, what sorts of tests can
we as researchers conduct on this corpus? I cannot say that I am entirely sure, although the sample case that
the authors offer at the end of their article may be one viable example. In this case, the authors test the
hypothetical hypothesis that later tonal composers preferred V7 chords over V chords, while earlier tonal
composers preferred the opposite. Ignoring the mysterious origins of this hypothesis[5], the corpus might
be able to provide an answer. Admittedly, the identification of V and V7 chords does require information
about the local tonic, so we cannot expect our results to be ideal. But since the main problem with the key-
finding algorithm seems to be that it views tonicizations and prolonged chromatic chords as tonic chords in
a spurious key area, we might presume that V or V7 chords are only underrepresented in the final statistics.
For the sake of argument, at least, let us simply presume that the key-finding algorithm models our
hearing very well. The next step would be to investigate how the proportion of V and V7 chords might be
tallied in a work from the corpus. Consider, for example, the consequent phrase from the parallel period
that opens the second movement of Mozarts Symphony no. 7, as shown in Figure 5. I will assume here
that the consequent phrase modulates from G major to the key of D major. Given this modulation, I hear
two V7 chords in this passage: the first during beat 4 of bar 7, the second during beat 2 of bar 8. Assuming
the modulation occurs prior to the downbeat of bar 7 (which is how the Bellman-Budge algorithm analyzes
this passage), I would not label any instances of a simple V triad here.
In contrast, the salami slice analysis of this passage would not find any V7 chords, because the
violin arpeggiations break up both of the V7 chords over time. The salami slice method would instead
identify only a single V triad occurring exactly on beat 4 of bar 7. In my analysis of the passage, therefore,
the ratio of V7 to V (2:0) is higher than and directly opposite the ratio found via the salami slice method
(0:1). The reason for this discrepancy, of course, is that the salami slice approach does not merge notes
displaced over time into a single harmonic entity. Especially in thinner textures, a listener often has to infer
harmonies by combining adjacent pitches into a single sonority. The Mozart excerpt below, for example
despite the four stavesis essentially a three-voice texture. Simply put, it is impossible for a three-voice
texture to play a fully-fledged dominant-seventh chord; these sonorities can only be implied.

# . . . . . . . #.
5
J
. . . . . . #.
3 3 3

Vln1 & c
3 3

. .
. . . .

. . 3#
p fp
#cf 3 3 3 3 . . . #. . 3
3 3
. .
3 3 3 3

3

&
3 3 3
. . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 .
Vln2

B #c # j
3

f p
J J J J
fp
Vla
J
fp
j J
p
? #c
J J J J
Vcl
Bs
J
f p

Figure 5. W. A. Mozart, Symphony no. 7, K. 45, II, mm. 58.

I do not know exactly how White and Quinn inventoried the number of V and V7 chords in the
YCAC, since they do not offer many details of this sample case in their article. I can only assume they
simply added up each salami-slice instance of those scale-degrees sets and then organized the results by
date. With this approach, their results may not be showing an increase in the ratio of V7 to V chords that a
listener would perceive; rather, their results may be showing only an increase in the ratio of V7 to V chords
that we would find at any given instant on the highest level of the musical surface. Since thicker textures
inherently have a higher probability of generating chords with higher cardinalities (i.e., the number of notes
played at the same time), their results may simply be reflecting a general thickening of texture and
instrumental resources over time. Indeed, it is well-known that typical ensemble sizes grew dramatically
from the late 1600s to the late 1800s. It should not be surprising, therefore, that we findon the most

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Empirical Musicology Review Vol. 11, No. 1, 2016

immediate and superficial level of the music captured by a salami slicemore four-note dominant-
functioning chords (i.e., V7) than three-note dominant-functioning chords (i.e., V). In fact, the authors
report that the increase in dominant-seventh chords mirrors a broader historical trend toward a greater
proportion of seventh chords overall. This increase in surface-level seventh chords would not be surprising,
given a corresponding increase in the number of instruments per work, since the odds of a composer
writing a four-note chord at any given moment would presumably increase as the number of available
instruments and voices increased.

FUTURE WORK

In the preceding sections, I have detailed a number of my reservations about the YCAC and its role in
corpus research. I do not mean to imply, however, that I think the YCAC will not be a useful resource for
empirical musicology. To the contrary, I believe the YCAC holds great potential for statistical studies
of music. In its current versionthe YCAC circa 2015the corpus has many limitations, as the
authors themselves state clearly. I hope that the corpus continues to be improved, with new versions
released on a regular basis, each of which will presumably build upon the extensive work that has
already been done. What might these improvements be? I have touched on a few suggestions already,
but it seems worth discussing possible directions for future work, which I will do here.
For one, the accuracy of the encodings needs to more closely reflect the original scores. The
authors mention that it has been estimated that 8% of the encoded pitches from classicalarchives.com do
not match the published score (2016, p. 6). This error rate seems dangerously high, in my view. As Huron
warns, a 1% pitch error rate potentially translates to a 2% error rate for intervals, a 4% error rate for chord
identification, and an 8% error rate for two-chord harmonic progressions (2013). Along similar lines, the
encodings should ideally, one day, include accurate meter and rhythmic information.
How can the pitch errors be corrected and meter information be added in such a large database? I
cannot say exactly. It would be a lot of work for many people to go through and make these changes.
Perhaps, though, the authors could post the raw MIDI data online, so that users could update the raw data
before the next batch parsing. The original MIDI data was crowd-sourced, after all, so maybe a crowd-
sourced approach would work here, too. Similarly, it might help if the authors released any custom
computer code that parses the MIDI files into the YCAC data format. Future researchers may only want to
investigate a select portion of the corpus. The YCAC would be a great starting point, upon which another
user could make improvements and additions on an as-needed basis.
Along these same lines, it seems as if there should be some way for musical experts to easily
repair or offer alternatives for the local key areas of the pieces. I am doubtful that a highly-accurate key-
finding algorithm will be developed in the next decade (although I am hopeful), given the complexities
involved with human perception. Having a ground truth for at least a portion of this corpus would be a
valuable resource, since very few encoded harmonic analyses of entire classical pieces are available, to my
knowledge. (Temperley [2009] is one possible example, except the analyses are for only excerpts, not
entire pieces.) Of course, multiple analyses by different expert listeners of the same set of works would be
ideal, if only to gauge the extent of ambiguity in key perception and harmonic analysis. A ground truth
would also be useful to train or test key-finding algorithms.
To conclude, I do believe that big data has the potential to answer some big questions in the field
of musicology. That said, I think users of the YCAC should have some big questions about any inferences
drawn from its big data. The YCAC definitely has valueone that I hope increases as further
improvements and refinements are made. For now, thoughto put it in terms of internet slangwith
regard to the YCAC, YMMV[6].

NOTES

[1] Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to: Trevor de Clercq, Department of
Recording Industry, 1301 East Main Street, Box 21, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, TN
37132, USA, [email protected].

[2] I am using the version of the YCAC that I downloaded from the YCAC website (http://ycac.yale.edu)
on November 16, 2015.

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[3] That being said, sometimes the offset is measured in eighth notes, presumably due to a user entering the
meter of the composition incorrectly. For example, the second movement of Beethovens piano sonata no.
26, op. 81a, is in a 2/4 meter, but the corpus encodes the piece as having four quarter notes per bar. (Each
eighth note in the score is represented as an offset integer in the corpus.)

[4] The implementation of the Bellman-Budge key-finding algorithm in this corpus seems to have the
tendency to take a prolonged chord as the local tonic for durations of anything more than about 8 quarter
notes. This duration is the length of the authors sliding window, so there seems to be a relationship
between the window size and the accuracy of the key-finding algorithm. Indeed, Bellman (2006, p. 88)
warns us that the optimum [window] width will vary depending on the nature of the music, particularly in
relation to the amount of different pitch classes present in the texture.

[5] One might wonder how and where the authors came up with this hypothetical hypothesis, as it does not
remind me of any typical intuitions found in the extant music theory scholarship. My best guess is that it
derives from Whites findings (2013) that an n-gram algorithm run on the YCAC posits V as the highest
ranked chord for the period 1650-1750 and V7 as the highest ranked chord for the period 1801-1900.

[6] YMMV is the common abbreviation for Your Mileage May Vary, typically understood to mean that
the results from or utility of the thing in question will vary from user to user.

REFERENCES

Bellman, H. (2006). About the determination of key of a musical excerpt. In K. Kronland-Martinet, T.

Voinier, & S. Ystad (Eds.), Proceedings of Computer Music Modeling and Retrieval (pp.
76-91). Heidelberg: Springer. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/11751069_7

Budge, H. (1943). A Study of Chord Frequencies Based on the Music of Representative Composers of the
Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Columbia University, New York.

de Clercq, T., & Temperley, D. (2011). A corpus analysis of rock harmony. Popular Music, 30(1), 4770.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S026114301000067X

Huron, D. (2013). On the virtuous and the vexatious in an age of big data. Music Perception, 31(1), 4-9.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/mp.2013.31.1.4

Temperley. D. (2007). Music and probability. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Temperley, D. (2009). A statistical analysis of tonal harmony. Retrieved from

http://theory.esm.rochester.edu/temperley/kp-stats/index.html

Temperley, D. (2012). Computational models of music cognition. In D. Deutsch (Ed.), The Psychology
of Music (pp. 327-368). Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Temperley, D., & de Clercq, T. (2013). Statistical analysis of harmony and melody in rock music. Journal
of New Music Research, 42(3), 187-204. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09298215.2013.788039

White, C. W. (2013). An alphabet reduction for chordal n-grams. In J. Yust, J. Wild, & J. A.
Burgoyne (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Mathematics and Computation in
Music (pp. 201-212). Heidelberg: Springer. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39357-0_16

White, C. W., & Quinn, I. (2016). The Yale-Classical Archives Corpus. Empirical Musicology
Review, 11(1), 5058. http://dx.doi.org/10.18061/emr.v11i1.4958

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