Tonality

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This article is about the musical system. For linguistic feature, see tone
(linguistics). For tone colour, see timbre. For use of this term in photography,
see tonal range.

Perfect authentic cadence (IV�V�I chord progression, in which we see the chords F
major, G major, and then C major, in four-part harmony) in C major About this
soundPlay (help�info). "Tonal music is built around these tonic and dominant
arrival points [cadences], and they form one of the fundamental building blocks of
musical structure" (Benjamin, Horvitz, and Nelson 2008, 63).
Tonality is the arrangement of pitches and/or chords of a musical work in a
hierarchy of perceived relations, stabilities, attractions and directionality. In
this hierarchy, the single pitch or triadic chord with the greatest stability is
called the tonic. The root of the tonic chord forms the name given to the key; so
in the key of C major, the note C is both the tonic of the scale and the root of
the tonic chord (which is C�E�G). Simple folk music songs often start and end with
the tonic note. The most common use of the term "is to designate the arrangement of
musical phenomena around a referential tonic in European music from about 1600 to
about 1910" (Hyer 2001). Contemporary classical music from 1910 to the 2000s may
practice or avoid any sort of tonality�but harmony in almost all Western popular
music remains tonal.[vague] Harmony in jazz includes many but not all tonal
characteristics of the European common practice period, sometimes known as
"classical music".

"All harmonic idioms in popular music are tonal, and none is without function"
(Tagg 2003, 534).[vague] Tonality is an organized system of tones (e.g., the tones
of a major or minor scale) in which one tone (the tonic) becomes the central point
for the remaining tones. The other tones in a tonal piece are all defined in terms
of their relationship to the tonic. In tonality, the tonic (tonal center) is the
tone of complete relaxation and stability, the target toward which other tones lead
(Benward & Saker 2003, 36). The cadence (coming to rest point) in which the
dominant chord or dominant seventh chord resolves to the tonic chord plays an
important role in establishing the tonality of a piece. "Tonal music is music that
is unified and dimensional. Music is unified if it is exhaustively referable to a
precompositional system generated by a single constructive principle derived from a
basic scale-type; it is dimensional if it can nonetheless be distinguished from
that precompositional ordering" (Pitt 1995, 299).

The term tonalit� originated with Alexandre-�tienne Choron (1810) and was borrowed
by Fran�ois-Joseph F�tis in 1840 (Reti 1958,[page needed]; Simms 1975, 119; Judd
1998a, 5; Heyer 2001; Brown 2005, xiii). According to Carl Dahlhaus, however, the
term tonalit� was only coined by Castil-Blaze in 1821 (Dahlhaus 1967, 960; Dahlhaus
1980, 51). Although F�tis used it as a general term for a system of musical
organization and spoke of types de tonalit�s rather than a single system, today the
term is most often used to refer to major�minor tonality, the system of musical
organization of the common practice period. Major-minor tonality is also called
harmonic tonality (in the title of Carl Dahlhaus 1990, translating the German
harmonische Tonalit�t), diatonic tonality, common practice tonality, functional
tonality, or just tonality.

Contents
1 Characteristics and features
1.1 1. Systematic organizatio
1.2 2. Theoretical arrangement of pitches
1.3 3. Contrast with modal and atonal system
1.4 4. Pre-modern concept
1.5 5. Referential tonic
1.6 6. Tonal theories
1.7 7. Synonym for "key"
1.8 8. Other perspectives
1.9 Form
1.10 Consonance and dissonance
1.11 Tonal musics
2 History and theory
2.1 18th century
2.2 19th century
2.3 20th century
3 Theoretical underpinnings
4 Outside common-practice period
5 Computational methods to determine the key
6 See also
7 Sources
8 Further reading
9 External links
Characteristics and features
At least eight distinct senses of the word "tonality" (and corresponding adjective,
"tonal"), some mutually exclusive, have been identified (Hyer 2001):[vague]

1. Systematic organization
The word tonality may describe any systematic organization of pitch phenomena in
any music at all, including pre-17th century western music as well as much non-
western music, such as music based on the slendro and pelog pitch collections of
Indonesian gamelan, or employing the modal nuclei of the Arabic maqam or the Indian
raga system.

This sense also applies to the tonic/dominant/subdominant harmonic harmonic

constellations in the theories of Jean-Philippe Rameau as well as the 144 basic
transformations of twelve-tone technique. By the middle of the 20th century, it had
become "evident that triadic structure does not necessarily generate a tone center,
that non-triadic harmonic formations may be made to function as referential
elements, and that the assumption of a twelve-tone complex does not preclude the
existence of tone centers" (Perle 1991, 8).

For the composer and theorist George Perle, tonality is not "a matter of 'tone-
centeredness', whether based on a 'natural' hierarchy of pitches derived from the
overtone series or an 'artificial' pre compositional ordering of the pitch
material; nor is it essentially connected to the kinds of pitch structures one
finds in traditional diatonic music" (Pitt 1995, 291). This sense (like some of the
others) is susceptible to ideological employment, as Schoenberg, did by relying on
the idea of a progressive development in musical resources "to compress divergent
fin-de-si�cle compositional practices into a single historical lineage in which his
own music brings one historical era to a close and begins the next." From this
point of view, twelve-tone music could be regarded "either as the natural and
inevitable culmination of an organic motivic process (Webern) or as a historical
Aufhebung (Adorno), the dialectical synthesis of late Romantic motivic practice on
the one hand with a musical sublimation of tonality as pure system on the other"
(Hyer 2001).

2. Theoretical arrangement of pitches

In another sense, tonality means any rational and self-contained theoretical
arrangement of musical pitches, existing prior to any concrete embodiment in music.

For example, "Sainsbury, who had Choron translated into English in 1825, rendered
the first occurrence of tonalit� as a 'system of modes' before matching it with the
neologism 'tonality'. While tonality qua system constitutes a theoretical (and thus
imaginative) abstraction from actual music, it is often hypostatized in
musicological discourse, converted from a theoretical structure into a musical
reality. In this sense, it is understood as a Platonic form or prediscursive
musical essence that suffuses music with intelligible sense, which exists before
its concrete embodiment in music, and can thus be theorized and discussed apart
from actual musical contexts" (Hyer 2001).

3. Contrast with modal and atonal systems

To contrast with "modal" and "atonal", the term tonality is used to imply that
tonal music is discontinuous as a form of cultural expression from modal music
(before 1600) on the one hand and atonal music (after 1910) on the other.

4. Pre-modern concept
In some literature, tonality is a generic term applied to pre-modern music,
referring to the eight modes of the Western church, implying that important
historical continuities underlie music before and after the emergence of musical
modernism around 1600, with the difference between tonalit� ancienne (before 1600)
and tonalit� moderne (after 1600) being one of emphasis rather than of kind.

5. Referential tonic
In a general way, tonality can refer to a wide variety of musical phenomena
(harmonies, cadential formulae, harmonic progressions, melodic gestures, formal
categories) as arranged or understood in relation to a referential tonic.

6. Tonal theories
In a slightly different sense to the one above, tonality can also be used to refer
to musical phenomena perceived or preinterpreted in terms of the categories of
tonal theories.

This is a psychophysical sense, where for example "listeners tend to hear a given
pitch as, for instance, an A above middle C, an augmented 4th above E?, the minor
3rd in an F? minor triad, a dominant in relation to D, or scale degree 2 (where the
caret designates a scale degree) in G major rather than a mere acoustical
frequency, in this case 440 Hz" (Hyer 2001).

7. Synonym for "key"

The word tonality has more recently been used by amateur musicians and in popular
music as a synonym for "key"�in this sense meaning "keyness"

This is the most common usage, referring to the arrangement of musical phenomena
around a referential tonic, as found in European music from about 1600 to about
1910, using two modal genera, major and minor

8. Other perspectives
There is a loose assortment of ideas associated with the term.

"Tonal harmonies must always include the third of the chord" (Brown 2005, 46).

In major and minor harmonies, the perfect fifth is often implied and understood by
the listener even if it is not present. To function as a tonic, a chord must be
either a major or a minor triad. Dominant function requires a major-quality triad
with a root a perfect fifth above the affiliated tonic and containing the leading
tone of the key. This dominant triad must be preceded by a chord progression that
establishes the dominant as the penultimate goal of a motion that is completed by
moving on to the tonic. In this final dominant-to-tonic progression, the leading
tone normally ascends by semitone motion to the tonic scale degree (Berry 1976, 54;
Brown 2005, 4; Burnett and Nitzberg 2007, 97; Rogers 2004, 47). A dominant seventh
chord always consist of a major triad with an added minor seventh above the root.
To achieve this in minor keys, the seventh scale degree must be raised to create a
major triad on the dominant (Duckworth 2015, 225; Mayfield 2013, 94).

David Cope (1997,[page needed]) considers key, consonance and dissonance

(relaxation and tension, respectively), and hierarchical relationships the three
most basic concepts in tonality.

Carl Dahlhaus (Dahlhaus 1990, 102) lists the characteristic schemata of tonal
harmony, "typified in the compositional formulas of the 16th and early 17th
centuries," as the "complete cadence" I�ii�V�I, I�IV�V�I, I�IV�I�V�I; the circle of
fifths progression I�IV�vii��iii�vi�ii�V�I; and the major�minor parallelism: minor
v�i�VII�III equals major iii�vi�V�I; or minor III�VII�i�v equals major I�V�vi�iii.
The last of these progressions is characterized by "retrograde" harmonic motion.

Form
Main article: Musical form
Consonance and dissonance
Main article: Consonance and dissonance
The consonance and dissonance of different intervals plays an important role in
establishing the tonality of a piece or section in common practice music and
popular music. For example, for a simple folk music song in the key of C Major,
almost all of the triadic chords in the song will be Major or minor chords which
are stable and consonant (e.g., in the key of C Major, commonly-used chords include
D minor, F Major, G Major, etc.). The most commonly used dissonant chord in a pop
song context is the dominant seventh chord built on the fifth scale degree; in the
key of C Major, this would be a G dominant seventh chord, or G7 chord, which
contains the pitches G, B, D and F. This dominant seventh chord contains a
dissonant tritone interval between the notes B and F. In pop music, the listener
will expect this tritone to be resolved to a consonant, stable chord (in this case,
typically a C Major cadence (coming to rest point) or a deceptive cadence to an A
minor chord).

Tonal musics
"The larger portion of the world's folk and art music can be categorized as tonal,"
as long as the definition is as follows: "Tonal music gives priority to a single
tone or tonic. In this kind of music all the constituent tones and resulting tonal
relationships are heard and identified relative to their tonic" (Susanni 2012, 66).
In this sense, "All harmonic idioms in popular music are tonal, and none is without
function" (Tagg 2003, 534). However, "within the continuing hegemony of tonality
there is evidence for a relatively separate tradition of genuine folk musics, which
do not operate completely or even mainly according to the assumptions or rules of
tonality. � throughout the reign of tonality there seem to have existed
subterranean folk musical traditions organized on principles different from
tonality, and often modal: Celtic songs and blues are obvious examples" (Shepherd,
Virden, Vulliamy, and Wishart 1977, 156).

According to Allan Moore (1995, 191), "part of the heritage of rock lies within
common-practice tonality" (Burns 2000, 213) but, because the leading-note/tonic
relationship is "axiomatic to the definition of common-practice tonality", and a
fundamental feature of rock music's identity is the absence of a diatonic leading
tone, the harmonic practices of rock music, "while sharing many features with
classical tonality, are nonetheless distinct" (Moore 1995, 187). Power chords are
especially problematic when trying to apply classical functional tonality to
certain varieties of popular music. Genres such as heavy metal, new wave, punk
rock, and grunge music "took power chords into new arenas, often with a reduced
emphasis on tonal function. These genres are often expressed in two parts�a bass
line doubled in fifths, and a single vocal part. Power chord technique was often
allied with modal procedure" (Everett 2000, 331).

Much jazz is tonal, but "functional tonality in jazz has different properties than
that of common-practice classical music. These properties are represented by a
unique set of rules dictating the unfolding of harmonic function, voice-leading
conventions, and the overall behavior of chord tones and chordal extensions"
(Terefenko 2014, 26).

History and theory

18th century
Jean-Philippe Rameau's Treatise on Harmony (1722) is the earliest effort to explain
tonal harmony through a coherent system based on acoustical principles (Girdlestone
1969, 520), built upon the functional unit being the triad, with inversions.

19th century
The term "tonalit�" (tonality) was first used in 1810 by Alexandre Choron in the
preface "Sommaire de l'histoire de la musique" (Brown 2005, xiii) to the
"Dictionnaire historique des musiciens artistes et amateurs" (which he published in
collaboration with Fran�ois-Joseph-Marie Fayolle) to describe the arrangement of
the dominant and subdominant above and below the tonic�a constellation that had
been made familiar by Rameau. According to Choron, this pattern, which he called
tonalit� moderne, distinguished modern music's harmonic organization from that of
earlier [pre 17th century] music, including "tonalit� des Grecs" (ancient Greek
modes) and "tonalit� eccl�siastique" (plainchant) (Choron 1810, xxxvii�xl; Hyer
2001). According to Choron, the beginnings of this modern tonality are found in the
music of Claudio Monteverdi around the year 1595, but it was more than a century
later that the full application of tonal harmony finally supplanted the older
reliance on the melodic orientation of the church modes, in the music of the
Neapolitan School�most especially that of Francesco Durante (Choron 1810, xxxviii,
xl).

Fran�ois-Joseph F�tis developed the concept of tonalit� in the 1830s and 1840s
(Brown 2005, xiii), finally codifying his theory of tonality in 1844, in his Trait�
complet de la th�orie et de la pratique de l'harmonie (Hyer 2001; Wangerm�e and
Ellis 2001). F�tis saw tonalit� moderne as the historically evolving phenomenon
with three stages: tonality of ordre transitonique ("transitonic order"), of ordre
pluritonique ("pluritonic order") and, finally, ordre omnitonique ("omnitonic
order"). The "transitonic" phase of tonality he connected with the late Monteverdi.
He described his earliest example of tonalit� moderne thus: "In the passage quoted
here from Monteverdi's madrigal (Cruda amarilli, mm. 9�19 and 24�30), one sees a
tonality determined by the accord parfait [root position major chord] on the tonic,
by the sixth chord assigned to the chords on the third and seventh degrees of the
scale, by the optional choice of the accord parfait or the sixth chord on the sixth
degree, and finally, by the accord parfait and, above all, by the unprepared
seventh chord (with major third) on the dominant" (F�tis 1844, 171). Among most
subtle representatives of "pluritonic order" there were Mozart and Rossini; this
stage he saw as the culmination and perfection of tonalit� moderne. The romantic
tonality of Berlioz and especially Wagner he related to "omnitonic order" with its
"insatiable desire for modulation" (Hyer 2002, 748). His prophetic vision of the
omnitonic order (though he didn't approve it personally) as the way of further
development of tonality was a remarkable innovation to historic and theoretic
concepts of the 19th century (Simms 1975, 132).

Tonalit� ancienne Fetis described as tonality of ordre unitonique (establishing one

key and remaining in that key for the duration of the piece). The principal example
of this "unitonic order" tonality he saw in the Western plainchant.

F�tis believed that tonality, tonalit� moderne, was entirely cultural, saying, "For
the elements of music, nature provides nothing but a multitude of tones differing
in pitch, duration, and intensity by the greater or least degree ... The conception
of the relationships that exist among them is awakened in the intellect, and, by
the action of sensitivity on the one hand, and will on the other, the mind
coordinates the tones into different series, each of which corresponds to a
particular class of emotions, sentiments, and ideas. Hence these series become
various types of tonalities."(F�tis 1844, 11�12) "But one will say, 'What is the
principle behind these scales, and what, if not acoustic phenomena and the laws of
mathematics, has set the order of their tones?' I respond that this principle is
purely metaphysical [anthropological]. We conceive this order and the melodic and
harmonic phenomena that spring from it out of our conformation and
education."(F�tis 1844, 249)

F�tis' "Trait� complet" was very popular. In France alone the book was printed
between 1844 and 1903 twenty times. The 1st edition was printed in Paris and
Brussels in 1844, the 9th edition was printed in Paris in 1864, and the 20th
edition was printed in Paris in 1903. For more bibliographical information, see
worldcat.org.

In contrast, Hugo Riemann believed tonality, "affinities between tones" or

Tonverwandtschaften, was entirely natural and, following Moritz Hauptmann (1853),
that the major third and perfect fifth were the only "directly intelligible"
intervals, and that I, IV, and V, the tonic, subdominant, and dominant were related
by the perfect fifths between their root notes (Dahlhaus 1990, 101�02).

It is in this era that the word tonality was popularized by F�tis (Wangerm�e and
Ellis 2001).

Theorists such as Hugo Riemann, and later Edward Lowinsky (1962) and others, pushed
back the date when modern tonality began, and the cadence began to be seen as the
definitive way that a tonality is established in a work of music (Judd 1998).

In the music of some late-Romantic or post-Romantic composers such as Richard

Wagner, Hugo Wolf, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Anton Bruckner, Gustav Mahler, Richard
Strauss, Alexander Scriabin, and others, we find a variety of harmonic and linear
procedures that have the effect of weakening functional tonality. These procedures
may produce a suspension of tonality or may create a sense of tonal ambiguity, even
to the point that at times the sense of tonality is completely lost. Schoenberg
described this kind of tonality (with references to the music of Wagner, Mahler,
and himself, amongst others) as "aufgehobene Tonalit�t" and "schwebende Tonalit�t"
(Schoenberg 1922, 444, 459�60), usually rendered in English as "suspended" ("not in
effect", "cancelled") tonality and "fluctuating" ("suspended", "not yet decided")
tonality, respectively (Schoenberg 1978, 383).

20th century
In the early 20th century, the tonality that had prevailed since the 17th century
was seen to have reached a crisis or break down point. Because of the "...increased
use of the ambiguous chords, the less probable harmonic progressions, and the more
unusual melodic and rhythmic inflections,"(Meyer 1967, 241) the syntax of
functional harmony loosened to the point where, "At best, the felt probabilities of
the style system had become obscure; at worst, they were approaching a uniformity
which provided few guides for either composition or listening."(Meyer 1967, 241)

Tonality may be considered generally, with no restrictions on the date or place the
music was produced, and little restriction on the materials and methods used. This
definition includes pre-17th century western music, as well as much non-western
music. By the middle of the 20th century, it had become "evident that triadic
structure does not necessarily generate a tone center, that non-triadic harmonic
formations may be made to function as referential elements, and that the assumption
of a twelve-tone complex does not preclude the existence of tone centers" (Perle
1991, 8). For the composer and theorist George Perle, tonality is not "a matter of
'tone-centeredness', whether based on a 'natural' hierarchy of pitches derived from
the overtone series or an 'artificial' pre compositional ordering of the pitch
material; nor is it essentially connected to the kinds of pitch structures one
finds in traditional diatonic music" (Pitt 1995, 291).

Theoretical underpinnings
One area of disagreement going back to the origin of the term tonality is whether
tonality is natural or inherent in acoustical phenomena, whether it is inherent in
the human nervous system or a psychological construct, whether it is inborn or
learned, and to what degree it is all these things (Meyer 1967, 236). A viewpoint
held by many theorists since the third quarter of the 19th century, following the
publication in 1862 of the first edition of Helmholtz's On the Sensation of Tone
(Helmholtz 1877), holds that diatonic scales and tonality arise from natural
overtones (Riemann 1872, Riemann 1875, Riemann 1882, Riemann 1893, Riemann 1905,
Riemann & 1914�15; Schenker & 1906�35; Hindemith & 1937�70).

Rudolph R�ti differentiates between harmonic tonality of the traditional kind found
in homophony, and melodic tonality, as in monophony. In the harmonic kind, tonality
is produced through the V-I chord progression, <d> <t>. He argues that in the
progression I-x-V-I (and all progressions), V-I is the only step "which as such
produces the effect of tonality," and that all other chord successions, diatonic or
not, being more or less similar to the tonic-dominant, are "the composer's free
invention." He describes melodic tonality (the term coined independently and 10
years earlier by Estonian composer Jaan Soonvald (Rais 1992, 46)) as being
"entirely different from the classical type," wherein, "the whole line is to be
understood as a musical unit mainly through its relationship to this basic note
[the tonic]," this note not always being the tonic as interpreted according to
harmonic tonality. His examples are ancient Jewish and Gregorian chant and other
Eastern music, and he points out how these melodies often may be interrupted at any
point and returned to the tonic, yet harmonically tonal melodies, such as that from
Mozart's The Magic Flute below, are actually "strict harmonic-rhythmic pattern[s],"
and include many points "from which it is impossible, that is, illogical, unless we
want to destroy the innermost sense of the whole line" to return to the tonic (Reti
1958,[page needed]).

The tonic feels more or less natural after each note of, for example, Mozart's The
Magic Flute

About this soundPlay normally (help�info) and compare with About this
soundimpossible return (help�info) after B?
x = return to tonic near inevitable
? (circled x) = possible but not inevitable
circle = impossible
(Reti 1958,[page needed])
Consequently, he argues, melodically tonal melodies resist harmonization and only
reemerge in western music after, "harmonic tonality was abandoned," as in the music
of Claude Debussy: "melodic tonality plus modulation is [Debussy's] modern
tonality" (Reti 1958, 23).

Outside common-practice period

The noun "tonality" and adjective "tonal" are widely applied also, in studies of
early and modern Western music, and in non-Western traditional music (Arabic maqam,
Indian raga, Indonesian slendro etc.), to the "systematic arrangements of pitch
phenomena and relations between them" (Hyer 2001; Hyer 2002). Felix W�rner, Ullrich
Scheideler, and Philip Rupprecht in the introduction to a collection of essays
dedicated to the concept and practice of tonality between 1900 and 1950 describe it
generally as "the awareness of key in music" (W�rner, Scheideler, and Rupprecht
2012, 11).

Harold Powers, in a series of articles, used terms "sixteenth-century tonalities"

(Powers 1981, 439; Powers 1992, 12; Powers 1996, 221) and "Renaissance tonality"
(Powers 1996, 226). He borrowed German "Tonartentyp" from Siegfried Hermelink
(1960), who related it to Palestrina, translated it into English as "tonal type"
(Powers 1981, 439), and systematically applied the concept of "tonal types" to
Renaissance sacred and paraliturgical polyphony. Cristle Collins Judd (the author
of many articles and a thesis dedicated to the early pitch systems) found
"tonalities" in this sense in motets of Josquin Desprez (Judd 1992). Judd also
wrote of "chant-based tonality" (Judd 1998c), meaning "tonal" polyphonic
compositions based on plainchant. Peter Lefferts found "tonal types" in the French
polyphonic chanson of the 14th century (Lefferts 1995), Italian musicologists Marco
Mangani and Daniele Sabaino in the late Renaissance music (Mangani and Sabaino
2008), and so on.

The wide usage of "tonality" and "tonal" has been supported by several other
musicologists (of diverse provenance); it can be traced, e.g., in the articles
collected in Judd 1998a. A possible reason for this broader usage of terms
"tonality" and "tonal" is the attempt to translate German "Tonart" as "tonality"
and "Tonarten-" prefix as "tonal" (for example, it is rendered so in the seminal
New Grove article "Mode", Powers et al. 2001, �V, 1, et passim; Powers 1981, 441;
Powers 1982, 59, 61 etc.). Therefore, two different German words "Tonart" and
"Tonalit�t" have sometimes been translated as "tonality" although they are not the
same words in German.

Riemann's illustration of a non-diatonic cadence possessing Tonalit�t without

Tonart (Kopp 2011, 401) About this soundPlay (help�info)
In 1882, Hugo Riemann defined the term Tonalit�t specifically to include chromatic
as well as diatonic relationships to a tonic, in contrast to the usual diatonic
concept of Tonart. In the neo-Riemannian theory of the late 20th century, however,
the same chromatic chord relations cited by Riemann came to be regarded as a
fundamental example of nontonal triadic relations, reinterpreted as a product of
the hexatonic cycle (the six-pitch-class set forming a scale of alternating minor
thirds and semitones, Forte's set-type 6�20, but manifested as a succession of from
four to six alternating major and minor triads), defined without reference to a
tonic (Cohn 1996, 18, et passim; Kopp 2011, 401).

In the 20th century, music that no longer conformed to the strict definition of
common-practice tonality could nevertheless still involve musical phenomena
(harmonies, cadential formulae, harmonic progressions, melodic gestures, formal
categories) arranged or understood in relation to a referential tonic (Hyer 2001).
For example, the closing bars of the first movement of B�la Bart�k's Music for
Strings, Percussion, and Celesta do not involve a composed-out triad, but rather a
diverging-converging pair of chromatic lines moving from a unison A to an octave E?
and back to a unison A again, providing a framing "deep structure" based on a
tritone relationship that nevertheless is not analogous to a tonic-dominant axis,
but rather remains within the single functional domain of the tonic, A (Agawu 2009,
72). To distinguish this species of tonality (found also, for example, in the music
of Barber, Berg, Bernstein, Britten, Fine, Hindemith, Poulenc, Prokofiev, and,
especially, Stravinsky) from the stricter kind associated with the 18th century,
some writers use the term "neotonality" (Burkholder, Grout, and Palisca 2009, 838,
885; Silberman 2006, v, 2, 33, 37, 58, 65, 108), while others prefer to use the
term centricity (Straus 2000, 112�14), and still others retain the term, tonality
(White 1979, 558), in its broader sense, or use word combinations like extended
tonality (Kholopov; Lyzhov).

Computational methods to determine the key

In music information retrieval, techniques have been developed to determine the key
of a piece of classical Western music (recorded in audio data format)
automatically. These methods are often based on a compressed representation of the
pitch content in a 12-dimensional pitch-class profile (chromagram) and a subsequent
procedure that finds the best match between this representation and one of the
prototype vectors of the 24 minor and major keys (Purwins, Blankertz, and Obermayer
2000, 270�72). For implementation, often the constant-Q transform is used,
displaying the musical signal on a log frequency scale. Although a radical
(over)simplification of the concept of tonality, such methods can predict the key
of classical Western music well for most pieces. Other methods also take into
consideration the sequentiality of music.