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

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.