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The diachronic development of Debussy’s musical style: a corpus study with Discrete Fourier Transform

Author

Listed:
  • Sabrina Laneve

    (State Music Conservatory “Giuseppe Verdi”)

  • Ludovica Schaerf

    (Digital Humanities Institute, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)

  • Gabriele Cecchetti

    (Digital and Cognitive Musicology Lab, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)

  • Johannes Hentschel

    (Digital and Cognitive Musicology Lab, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)

  • Martin Rohrmeier

    (Digital and Cognitive Musicology Lab, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)

Abstract

Claude Debussy’s personal style is typically characterised as a departure from earlier diatonic tonality, including a greater variety of pitch-class materials organised in fragmented yet coherent compositions. Exploiting the music-theoretical interpretability of Discrete Fourier Transforms over pitch-class distributions, we performed a corpus study over Debussy’s solo-piano works in order to investigate the diachronic development of such stylistic features across the composer’s lifespan. We propose quantitative heuristics for the prevalence of different pitch-class prototypes, the fragmentation of a piece across different prototypes, as well as some aspect of the overall coherence of a piece. We found strong evidence for a decrease of diatonicity in favour of octatonicity, as well as for an increase of fragmentation accompanied by non-decreasing coherence. These results contribute to the understanding of the historical development of extended-tonal harmony, while representing a fertile testing ground for the interaction of computational corpus-based methods with traditional music analytical approaches.

Suggested Citation

  • Sabrina Laneve & Ludovica Schaerf & Gabriele Cecchetti & Johannes Hentschel & Martin Rohrmeier, 2023. "The diachronic development of Debussy’s musical style: a corpus study with Discrete Fourier Transform," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 10(1), pages 1-13, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palcom:v:10:y:2023:i:1:d:10.1057_s41599-023-01796-7
    DOI: 10.1057/s41599-023-01796-7
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    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Fabian C Moss & Markus Neuwirth & Daniel Harasim & Martin Rohrmeier, 2019. "Statistical characteristics of tonal harmony: A corpus study of Beethoven’s string quartets," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 14(6), pages 1-16, June.
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