Modeling Stylistic Co-evolution in Symbolic Music Heritage Collections
2026-07-27 • Sound
SoundComputer Science and Game Theory
AI summaryⓘ
The authors developed a new method to study how styles in Western classical music changed over time by analyzing chord sequences from historical musical works. They created a way to represent music pieces mathematically, track how harmonic styles evolved in different countries, and model the influences between these regions using network dynamics. Applying this to music from 1875 to 1940, their results match known historical relationships between musical traditions in Europe. Their approach offers a useful, data-driven tool for music history research without claiming direct cause-and-effect conclusions.
harmonic changechord embeddingsKalman filteringDeGroot modelFriedkin-Johnsen modelWestern art musiccross-cultural influencesymbolic music representationhistorical musicologytime series modeling
Authors
Yulong He, Ivan Smirnov, Yanming Li
Abstract
Digitized musical heritage collections offer new opportunities to examine how stylistic traditions change over historical time, but computational analyses often reduce musical works to static classifications or similarity scores. This article proposes a representation-to-dynamics framework for studying cross-cultural harmonic change in Western art music. Starting from symbolic chord sequences, we derive contextual chord embeddings, project work-level representations into a shared harmonic space, and reconstruct country-level trajectories through temporally causal Kalman filtering. These trajectories are then modeled with DeGroot and Friedkin--Johnsen dynamics, yielding interpretable influence-like networks and estimates of stylistic anchoring. We apply the framework to a curated corpus of 480 dated works from 1875 to 1940 across Russia, France, Germany, Austria, and a heterogeneous ''Others'' group. Models fitted on 1875--1925 are evaluated through recursive forecasts for 1930--1940, testing whether the estimated dependency structure remains informative across a potentially changing historical and stylistic regime. The estimated trajectories and influence patterns are broadly consistent with established music-historical accounts of late Romantic and early modernist exchange, including the close relationship between German and Austrian traditions and historically plausible cross-currents between Russian and French traditions. PCA-variance-weighted estimation provides modest improvements while preserving a single interpretable influence network. Rather than treating the estimated matrices as direct causal evidence, the framework offers a reproducible quantitative layer for cultural heritage research, complementing archival and musicological interpretation.