Revealing the Hidden Motives of Chromaticism in Music through Computational Semantic Visualizations

State-of-the-art ways for visualizing high-level music concepts are currently a trend in music computing, aiming at bridging the semantic gap between music information retrieval and human knowledge. This work presents the analysis of Brahms’s String Quartet Op.51 No.1 concerning the concept of chromaticism by using the chromatic index (a chroma measure especially designed for calculating chromatic elements within a piece of music with useful diagnostic value) as a metric. The visualization of the chromatic analysis with actual colours exhibits chromatic variations to musicologists and can even be used as a digital signature for music. The suggested computational approach in MIDI and Audio Files reveals specific motives of the quartet that provide interesting chromatic phenomena. A comparative study between the results of analysis on score-based data and the performance data (from an indifferent live performance) brings the diversity of chromatic perception the same music can cause to light. Moreover, Allen Forte’s proposed motives in his study of Brahms’s Op.51 No.1 are examined for chromatic elements. Each one of the four voices is separately analyzed so that its specific role in the piece’s progression will become evident. Additive techniques are used to calculate the overall chromatic indices of the quartet.