Journal of New Music Research

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Harmony and form in Brazilian Choro: A corpus-

driven approach to musical style analysis

Fabian C. Moss , Willian Fernandes Souza & Martin Rohrmeier

To cite this article: Fabian C. Moss , Willian Fernandes Souza & Martin Rohrmeier (2020):
Harmony and form in Brazilian Choro: A corpus-driven approach to musical style analysis, Journal
of New Music Research, DOI: 10.1080/09298215.2020.1797109

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09298215.2020.1797109

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JOURNAL OF NEW MUSIC RESEARCH
https://doi.org/10.1080/09298215.2020.1797109

Harmony and form in Brazilian Choro: A corpus-driven approach to musical style

analysis
Fabian C. Moss a , Willian Fernandes Souza b and Martin Rohrmeiera
a Digital and Cognitive Musicology Lab, Digital Humanities Institute, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland;
b Cognição Musical e Processos Criativos, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Música, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This corpus study constitutes the first quantitative style analysis of Choro, a primarily instrumental Received 8 October 2018
music genre that emerged in Brazil at the end of the 19th century. We evaluate its description in a Accepted 22 June 2020
recent comprehensive textbook by transcribing the chord symbols and formal structure of the 295 KEYWORDS
representative pieces in the Choro Songbook. Our approach uncovers central stylistic traits of this Choro; musical style analysis;
musical idiom on empirical grounds. It thus advances data-driven musical style analysis by studying corpus study; harmony; form
both harmony and form in a musical genre that lies outside the traditional canon.

1. Introduction
A continuously growing body of corpus studies in the
field of computational music analysis aims at inves-
tigating centuries-old music-theoretical questions with
modern data-driven approaches.1 This leads not only
to refinements of the questions asked and advances in
the applied methodologies, but also to the creation of
symbolic datasets that facilitate style analysis. Existing
resources cover a diversity of musical genres, encod-
ings, formats, and methodologies. Many datasets con-
centrate on melody (Brinkman & Huron, 2018; Eerola
et al., 2009; Huron, 1996; Pearce & Wiggins, 2004;
Von Hippel & Huron, 2000), or harmony (Albrecht
& Shanahan, 2012; Burgoyne et al., 2013; Hedges
& Rohrmeier, 2011; Moss et al., 2019; Rohrmeier
& Cross, 2008; Temperley & de Clercq, 2013;
Tymoczko, 2003; White & Quinn, 2016), but rarely con-
sider aspects of formal structure (for an exception see
Sears et al., 2017) in order to describe, infer, or predict
idiosyncrasies and prototypical patterns of a certain style,
genre, or composer.
Although augmenting musical style analysis by apply-
ing statistical methods as well as concepts and measures
from information theory has long been acknowledged by
musicologists (Manzara et al., 1992; Meyer, 1957; Pearce
& Wiggins, 2004; Weiß et al., 2018; Youngblood, 1958),
the computational analysis of symbolic corpora has faced
several difficulties due to the diversity of analytical
methods (Basili et al., 2004; Brackett, 2016; Fabbri, 2014;
McKay & Fujinaga, 2006) and the lack of standardised
encoding and annotation formats (Neuwirth et al., 2018;
Oramas et al., 2018).
In the words of Leonard Meyer, the goal of style analy-
sis is ‘to describe the patternings replicated in some group
of works, to discover and formulate the rules and strate-
gies that are the basis for such patternings, and to explain
in the light of these constraints how the characteristics
described are related to one another’ (Meyer, 1989, p. 38).
In this spirit, the present study provides an empirically-
grounded style analysis of the musical genre of Choro, a
primarily instrumental Brazilian music genre. Choro is
a musical practice that lies outside of canonical datasets
in music information retrieval (Panteli et al., 2018; Sav-
age, forthcoming) on classical music, e.g. Bach, Haydn,
Mozart, Beethoven (Jacoby et al., 2015; Moss et al., 2019;
Rohrmeier & Cross, 2008; Sears et al., 2017), and pop-
ular music, e.g. Jazz, Beatles, Charts (Broze & Shana-
han, 2013; Gauvin, 2015; Harte, 2010), and has thus not
been extensively studied empirically so far. We take as our
starting point the recent and comprehensive theoretical
account A estrutura do Choro (Almada, 2006) and eval-
uate the descriptions therein against transcriptions of a
collection of representative Choro pieces from the Choro
Songbook (Chediak, 2009, 2011a, 2011b).
Our analyses consider the chord symbols and the
formal structure of Choro pieces with computational

CONTACT Fabian C. Moss fabian.moss@epfl.ch Digital and Cognitive Musicology Lab, Digital Humanities Institute, École Polytechnique Fédérale de
Lausanne, Lausanne, VD, Switzerland
1 For discussions of this development see e.g. Neuwirth and Rohrmeier (2016); Temperley and VanHandel (2013).
© 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered,
transformed, or built upon in any way.
2 F. C. MOSS ET AL.
methods from musicological corpus research. In doing
so, we seek to gain particular insights into the struc-
tural features of harmony and form in this genre and
their mutual relationship. Moreover, we hope that our
contribution broadens the scope of computational music
research by focusing on a previously neglected genre.2
The following, we give a brief introduction to Choro
as a musical genre and its historical development, and
restate its main characteristics based on the qualita-
tive account in Almada (2006). Section 2 (‘Procedure
and Methods’) describes the Choro Songbook Corpus,
the dataset underlying our study, and how the data was
transcribed and transformed. It also contains a detailed
account of the methods used for analysis. Section 3
(‘Results and Discussion’) presents our findings and their
interpretations with respect to the style of Choro. Finally,
Section 4 summarises our findings, contextualises them,
and discusses potential avenues for future research.
1.1. History of Choro and its subgenres
Choro is a predominantly instrumental music tradition
that emerged in Brazil around 1870. It can be described as
a hybrid outcome of several genres with African, Ameri-
can, and European roots (Aranha, 2012; Piedade, 2003).
This friction gave rise to a genre that is considered to
be one of the first expressions of generic Brazilian music
(Mair, 2000). Since then, the production of Choro pieces
fluctuated, including, for instance, a revival in the late
1970’s (Livingston, 1999). Nowadays, one can witness a
genre subsisting in a rich collection of styles (Cazes, 1999;
Taborda, 2010; Valente, 2014). Choro can be conceptu-
alised as a category that includes three meanings: (1) it is
a social musical event; (2) it is a style, a manner of doing
music; and (3) it is a genre that contains specific musical
traits or features. The present research project adapts the
latter definition of Choro as a genre and considers as well
its subgenres.3
The history of Choro as well as the complex relation to
other genres and its subgenres is outlined in Figure 1. The
lateral extremes of the figure show its two main sources in
the 19th century: vocal genres such as Modinha and Sere-
nata on the left-hand side, and dances on the right-hand
side, with various origins such as Schottisch and Polca
from the Czech Republic, Mazurka from Poland, Valsa
from Austria, Fox-trot from the United States, and Lundu
from Angola and the region of Congo (Sandroni, 2001).
In the 19th century, the interaction between these salon
2 See Wundervald and Zeviani (2019) for a recent extensive study on genres in
Brazilian Popular music.
3 Most pieces in the Choro Songbook do not have a specified subgenre but are
just called Choro.
dances for piano created new subgenres such as Polka-
Mazurka or Polca-Lundu.
At the turn from the 19th to the 20th century, Polca-
Lundu split into two subgenres (at least in terms of its
social usage): Tango Brasileiro and Maxixe. The former
represents mostly piano pieces and the latter is a dance
also played by other instruments. Today, both are encom-
passed by Choro practices, especially events like Rodas de
Choro.4
Around the 1930’s, the term Choro was established
and promoted by publishers to create a brand and pop-
ularise it. Since then it is also known under other related
names, i.e. hybrid subgenres such as Choro-Serenata.
Before the 1930’s one can observe a high production of
Tangos (in Brazil as well as in Argentina). Due to the
strong association of Tango with the production in the
region of Río de la Plata (Argentinian Tango), the Tangos
Brasileiros were appropriated to the category of Choro.
Thus, Argentinian Tango can be conceived as a contrast-
ing genre in relationship with Choro (Sandroni, 2001).
The contact of Choro with other Brazilian genres in
the 1940s, for instance Samba and Canção, created new
subgenres such as Choro Sambado,5 or Choro-Canção.
In the second half of the 20th century, several genres
abraded on Choro indirectly, like Rock and Bossa Nova
(one can observe traces in harmonies or in performance
but without creating new subgenres), and directly like
Jazz, bringing about Choro-Jazz.
1.2. Harmony and form in Choro
A recent comprehensive resource on harmony and
form in Choro is Carlos Almada’s A Estrutura do
Choro (Almada, 2006), a textbook containing theoret-
ical descriptions as well as exercises for composition
and improvisation. In its theoretical part, Almada (2006,
pp. 7–26) describes various musical features such as har-
mony, form, and rhythm on different levels. For instance,
Almada (2006, p. 10) observes that the most recurrent
keys in Choro are F, C, G, and D for major keys, and
Dm, Am, Em, and Gm for minor keys. This ranked list of
most common keys is quite imprecise insofar as he only
mentions four keys for each mode and does not explain
the (estimated) relative frequencies of these keys. Almada
does not talk about different metres in Choro but virtually
all score examples in his book are in 2/4 metre. Only in
four out of 90 examples the 2/4 metre is notated explicitly.
4 Rodas de choro can be translated as Choro circles or Choro gigs where Choros
are mainly performed with an ensemble of guitars (with six and/or seven
strings), a cavaquinho, a mandolin, a flute, a clarinet, and a pandeiro.
5 For the purpose of our research, Samba-Choro, Choro-Samba, and Choro
Sambado are assumed to be the same, but we are aware that the musico-
logical position about these terms is still in development.
 JOURNAL OF NEW MUSIC RESEARCH 3

Figure 1. Indirect and direct influences of other genres in the context of Choro (based on de Souza, 2016a, 2016b). Solid lines represent
strong influences between genres, and dashed lines represent rather indirect ones. The colours stand for different time periods. Sub-
genres related to vocal genres are shown in the left part and dance-related sub-genres are shown in the right part.

Table 1. Prototypical key relations in Choros in three-part form
(Almada, 2006, pp. 9–10).
Parts A B A C
Major 1 I V I IV
Major 2 I VIm I IV
Minor Im III Im I Im
Note: If a Roman numeral is followed by the letter ‘m’ it depicts a minor key,
otherwise a major key.
One can assume that this metre is taken to be the default
in Choro.
Another interesting statement concerns the form and
local key structure within pieces. The formal arrange-
ment of Choro prototypically features a rondo-like par-
tition into three different parts (i.e. an A-B-A-C-A form).
This aspect is a commonplace of the Choro literature
(Almada, 2006; Mesquita, 2017; Sève, 2015), cited in his-
torical texts and, at times, subject of discussions among
musicians (Cazes, 1999). An alternative form is the two-
part rounded binary (A-B-A; Caplin, 1998), but it occurs
rather as an exception (Almada, 2006, p. 9). The most
common local key patterns for the three-part forms are
given in Table 1, two for the major mode and one for the
minor mode (Almada, 2006, pp. 9–10). In major pieces,
the second part (B) is most often in the dominant (V) or
relative key (VIm), and part C is most commonly in the
subdominant key (IV), whereas in minor pieces the sec-
ond part is most often in the relative key (III) and part C
in the parallel key (I).
Several authors observe that most parts have sixteen
bars with prototypical harmonic patterns (Almada, 2006,
2012; Ferrão & Navia, 2016). Almada’s textbook contains
a number of examples for both the major and minor
mode which are based only on a small sample consid-
ering mainly two composers, namely Joaquim Calado
A and Pixinguinha (Almada, 2006, acknowledgements).
I According to Sève, ‘the main element to functional char-
I acterisation of each phrase is the harmony rather than the
rhythm [of the melody]’ (Sève, 2015, p. 137). According
to this view, harmony aids to analyse formal aspects of
music which also dovetails with theories of musical form
in classical music. This would also entail that the 16-bar
parts are made of smaller regular formal units such as
periods or sentences (Caplin, 1998). With respect to har-
monic transitions in general, we expect to see patterns
that constitute the core in many Western tonal styles, such
as perfect cadences, V-I patterns, and the like.
Moreover, one can find very detailed instructions
about the employment of certain chords and chord types
(Almada, 2006, pp. 7–8): In major keys, chords on scale
degrees 1̂, 2̂, 3̂, 4̂, and 6̂ appear ‘most commonly’ as triads,
the dominant appears ‘always’ as V7, and VII is ‘rarely’
used. In the minor mode, chords on scale degrees 1̂, 3̂,
4̂, and 6̂ appear ‘most commonly’ as triads, whereas the
dominant can appear both as V7 or even Vm.
In addition to these rather simple triadic harmonies,
many chords in Choro have an extended structure,
involving sevenths, ninths, elevenths, and so forth. Based
on the history of the genre outlined above and previous
work by de Souza (2016a, 2016b), we expect that Choro
uses more modifications of triads and tetrads (alterations,
added, and omitted notes) over time because more and
more options become available, for instance due to influ-
ences from Jazz and Bossa Nova.6
6 Note that these genres are undergoing change themselves. For instance,
Broze and Shanahan (2013) show changes in chord usage for Jazz between
1924 and 1968.
4 F. C. MOSS ET AL.

To summarise, we use the corpus of transcribed har- 2.2. Transcription procedure

monies from the Choro Songook to empirically evaluate
The parts and phrase structure of the pieces are encoded
the stylistic norms proposed by Almada (2006).
in a recursive notation inspired by de Clercq and Temper-
ley (2011). Parts are defined by key changes and phrases
are groupings of bars of variable length that are, for
2. Procedure and methods
instance, determined by repetition signs, double bars,
2.1. Dataset or a coda. To ensure consistency and to enable algo-
rithmic analysis, we captured the chord symbols with a
The Choro Songbook Corpus consists of transcriptions of
PERL-style regular expression which is shown in the top
the chord symbols and the formal arrangement of all 295
panel of Figure 3, along with an example transcription
pieces in the three volumes of the Choro Songbook (Che-
of ‘Canhoto de Paraíba’ (Choro Songbook, volume 2) in
diak, 2009, 2011a, 2011b) into a machine-readable for-
the bottom panel that shows the overall harmonic struc-
mat. The transcriptions were executed by WFS and
ture as defined by the parts in two different keys as well as
proofread by FCM. The scores in the Choro Songbook
the phrases. Phrases in this context thus do not conform
consist of notated melodies and bass lines as well as
strictly to any music-theoretical definition but are rather
chord symbols. Only the chord symbols along with their
based on notational segments of the scores in the Choro
metrical and formal position were transcribed (see ‘Tran-
Songbook. The lengths of the phrases in this example
scription Procedure’). The chord symbols denote the root
extend from one bar (e.g. P2 and P6) to 15 bars (P3).
of the chord, the chord type such as major, minor, or
The last line of a transcription describes the over-
diminished, potentially added notes, and bass notes. The
all formal structure of a piece, beginning with a start
different parts of the pieces are annotated with capi-
symbol S that specifies the global key and metre. Sub-
tal letters (e.g. A, B, C). Since keys are not explicitly
sequent upward lines define the phrase structure of the
annotated in the songbook and can only be inferred
individual parts (e.g. PartA) and indicate key or metre
from the key signatures and final cadences, the key of a
changes, if applicable, in square brackets. In almost all
piece or part can be ambiguous. The keys of the pieces
cases, the assignment of the global and local keys was
were therefore determined by the authors. Additional
straight-forward. In the few more ambiguous cases, the
metadata, such as composer name and life dates, year
final cadence of a part or piece was used to determine the
of composition, title, and subgenre (e.g. Polca, Valsa),
key. The top lines of the transcription define the chord
were collected from various resources. Besides the largest
sequences in the phrases (e.g. P1). Phrase boundaries
category Choro, which makes up 67% of the corpus,
were determined by repetition signs, da capo, dal segno,
the most frequent subgenres are Valsa ( ∼ 10%), Choro
and codas. Bars in a phrase are separated by a conclud-
Sambado (5%), and Polca and Maxixe (each ∼ 4%).
ing bar line symbol ‘|’ and can contain any number of
The composition dates for this selection of Choros
chord symbols, separated by empty spaces. The duration
in the songbook range from 1875 to 2007 with two
of chord symbols is implicitly encoded by the number of
peaks in the 1950s and late 1970s (see the histogram in
chord symbols in a bar in combination with that bar’s
Figure 2).
metre. For instance, the bar ‘C G7 C |’ in a 3/4 metre
Although the set of pieces in the Choro Songbook
would result in a duration of a quarter note for each chord
Corpus is relatively small,7 the nature of the source
symbol. In a 2/4 metre, these chord symbols would be
allows us to assume representativity to some extent
interpreted as a triplet. If chord symbols are not evenly
because songbooks are produced in order to capture
spaced in a bar, they are placed on a metrical grid defined
the essence of a certain genre.8 This is, evidently, sub-
by the smallest chord duration. Consider for example the
ject to interpretations and decisions of the editors, thus
tresillo, a common rhythm in Brazilian music. In a 2/4
the present selection represents just one of many pos-
bar it consists of two dotted-eighth notes followed by
sibilities of interpretation along a tradition of Choro
a plain eighth note. The chord sequence ‘C G7 C’ in
$ practice.
this rhythm would thus be transcribed as ‘C . . G7
. . C . |’. Bars without chord symbols were tran-
scribed as empty bars that are interpreted as repetitions
of the preceding harmony. Bars with rests or uninter-
7 The Choro archive, for instance, at the Instituto Casa do Choro con- pretable harmonies on melodies such as chromatic lines
tains scanned scores of more than 10,000 pieces (http://acervo. were transcribed as NC (non-chord). Added notes and
casadochoro.com.br/Works).
8 Another popular example are the Real Books (Hal Leonard Publishing Corpo-
alterations were enclosed in (potentially multiple) paren-
ration, 2004), a comprehensive collection of Jazz standards. theses, e.g. D7(b9)(b13). If a chord symbol specifies

Figure 2. Historical distribution of pieces in the Choro Songbook.
Figure 3. PERL-style regular expression for chord symbols in the Choro Songbook Corpus (top) and transcription of ‘Canhoto de Paraíba’
(Choro Songbook, volume 2).
a bass note, it is transcribed after a slash, e.g. Gm/Bb,
similar to the notation used by Harte (2010).
2.3. Parsing and transformation
Since the notated scores in the Choro Songbook con-
tain many repetitions and da capo instructions, all pieces
were parsed and expanded automatically, so that the final
sequence of chord symbols corresponds to a full perfor-
mance of the piece as notated. An exemplary parse-tree
of the piece ‘Canhoto de Paraíba’ is shown in Figure 4.
This piece is in A major and in 2/4, as indicated by the
top-level symbol S[A, 2/4]. It modulates in its mid-
dle part (PartB[F#m]) to the relative key of F sharp
JOURNAL OF NEW MUSIC RESEARCH 5
minor and subsequently returns to A major. The mod-
ulation back to A major does not need to be encoded
explicitly, because it is inherited from the parent node (S)
in the tree. The modulation structure of the piece gives
it a three-part form (A-B-A), one of the most common
patterns (see ‘Key relations within a piece’).
These expanded transcriptions were subsequently
transformed into Roman numeral symbols in order to
allow for pattern discovery and comparison across dif-
ferent pieces. In this step, all parts of the chord symbol
remained invariant, except the root and the bass note.
The root was translated to a Roman numeral relative to
its local key, and the bass note was translated to an arabic
number relative to the root. The chord symbol Dm/A was
6 F. C. MOSS ET AL.
Figure 4. Hierarchical representation of ‘Canhoto de Paraíba’ as parsed from the transcription including all repetitions. Some non-
terminal symbols (e.g. P1 and P3) appear several times but are encoded only once (see Figure 3). The global key of the piece is A major
but part B (PartB) is in F sharp minor, the relative key.
accordingly translated to VIm/5 in the key of F major
and to IIm/5 in the key of C major. The corpus con-
tains 682 unique Roman numeral chord symbols after the
translation.
All transcriptions were transformed into a data
frame and saved in tab-separated value (TSV) for-
mat in order to facilitate the analysis. That data frame
contains the absolute and relative (to the local key)
chord symbols; scale degrees; bar numbers; chord
durations; global and local keys, modes, and metres;
path; root note; chord type; added and omitted notes;
bass note, and the filename of the transcription. The
data frame and the transcriptions are freely avail-
able at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3881347 for non-
commercial use.
2.4. Operationalizations
To evaluate whether Almada’s (2006) description of
Choro holds up to empirical scrutiny, we operationalise
the involved concepts in a quantitative way. All state-
ments regarding the frequency of occurrence of keys,
sequences of keys, and chords were quantified directly
by observing the absolute frequency f (x) of the respec-
tive items x, or sequences of items x = (x1 , . . . , xn ) (also
called n-grams; Manning & Schütze, 2003) in the dataset.
The relative frequency p(x) of an item x is the absolute
frequency f (x) divided by the the total number of unique
items in the dataset. Relative frequency is used as an esti-
mator for the probability p of the item x, p(x) = f (x)/N,
e.g. a chord symbol, occurring in the musical genre
Choro. Oftentimes, relative frequencies are not taken
with respect to the size of the whole corpus but rather
relative to the size of the subsets of all major and minor
pieces, respectively. The diachronic usage of chord modi-
fications was likewise quantified by the relative frequency
of occurrence per decade.
This approach is useful for individual chords or short
sequences thereof. It is problematic if the sequences
become so long that they occur only once in the cor-
pus and hence their frequencies are all identical. Since
we are particularly interested in the relation of harmony
and form, we need to take longer sequences of chords
(e.g. in 16- or 32-bar phrases) into account. To circum-
vent the mentioned obstacle, we apply a unigram model
that considers not the relative frequencies of the entire
phrases (16-grams, 32-grams) but only the per-bar rel-
ative frequency of chords within the phrases. Here, the
unigrams correspond to bars and might thus consist of
several chords contained in a bar. The likelihood of each
phrase is then calculated as the product of the probabili-
ties of the respective bars which, in turn, are estimated by
the relative unigram frequencies of chords within a given
bar.
A common distinction in Natural Language Process-
ing (NLP) is made between tokens and types (Manning
& Schütze, 2003). Tokens are concrete occurrences of
items, such as chords or keys, at a specific position in the
dataset. Types, on the other hand, are the alphabet of dif-
ferent symbols. The type-token ratio (TTR; Milička, 2012)
is thus a measure of lexical diversity. Moreover, the
detailed representation scheme of chord symbols in the
Choro dataset allows for detailed investigations of the dis-
tributions of chord types given a scale degree, for example
the distribution over chord types V, V7, V7(9), and oth-
ers given scale degree V. In particular, the entropy of these
distributions is used to compare different scale degrees.
Entropy is commonly used as a measure to quantify

uncertainty (Margulis & Beatty, 2008; Pearce, 2018). The
entropy H(X) of a discrete random variable X over an
alphabet of finite size N is defined as
 dbar (B1 , B2 ) =
H(X) = − p(x) log2 p(x).
x c2 ∈B2
The entropy is maximal, if all outcomes are equally likely
with probability 1/N. Consequently, the maximal entropy
is Hmax (X) = log2 (N). Because distributions generally
do not have the same support, it is necessary to use the
normalized entropy instead, also known as efficiency,
Hnorm (X) = H(X)/Hmax (X).
Note that the efficiency is bounded between 0 and 1. The
complementary quantity 1 − Hnorm is called redundancy
(MacKay, 2003).
To compare chord symbols, we introduce a simple
proxy for a metric of chord symbol dissimilarity. The
chord symbols in the Choro Songbook Corpus consist of
several chord features defined by the the parts of the reg-
ular expression in Figure 3. The metric takes into account
the chord features root (e.g. I, V, bIII), chord type (e.g.
m, +, o), chord alterations (e.g. omit3, 7, b13), and bass
notes (e.g. 3, 5). The overall chord dissimilarity of two
chord symbols c1 and c2 is defined as the weighted sum
of individual metrics for each feature,

d(c1 , c2 ) = λf df (c1 , c2 ),
f ∈F
with features F = {root, type, alteration, bass} and
respective weights λf . In our approach, we set the weight
of each feature to λf = 0.25.
Distance between chord roots is measured by their
distance on the line of fifths (Temperley, 2000). Accord-
ingly, roots I and V have a distance of 1 corresponding
to either a perfect fifth or a perfect fourth, whereas the
roots bIII and #II have a distance of 12, the dis-
tance of enharmonic equivalence. The distance between
chord types is measured as a Boolean feature. If two
chords c1 and c2 are of the same type (major, minor,
diminished, or augmented), this feature distance is 0, oth-
erwise it is 1. Analogously, the bass note distance is 0
if the two chords have the same bass note (relative to
the root) and 1 otherwise. The chord alterations met-
ric is defined as the cardinality of the symmetric differ-
ence between the two sets of extensions. For example, if
the chords are V7 and V7(b9)(#11), the symmetric
difference of their extensions is |{7} ∪ {7, b9, #11}| −
|{7} ∩ {7, b9, #11}| = 3 − 1 = 2.
The overall metric d can also be extended to measure
the dissimilarity of bars that each might contain mul-
tiple chords. In this case, the dissimilarity of two bars
JOURNAL OF NEW MUSIC RESEARCH 7
is defined as the arithmetic mean of all pairs of chords
between the two bars B1 and B2 ,

1
d(c1 , c2 ),
|B1 | · |B2 | c ∈B
1 1
where |B1 | and |B2 | are the cardinalities of bars B1 and
B2 , respectively. If both bars contain only one chord each,
dbar is equal to d.
3. Results and discussion
3.1. Basic statistics
We begin our analysis of Choro by observing a number
of basic statistics concerning the frequencies of pieces,
chord symbols, sub-genres, and composers. The final
dataset consists of 295 transcribed and expanded pieces9
with a total number of 44,067 chord tokens (682 unique
types). The songbook contains pieces by 180 composers
in 19 sub-genres. The two most prominent composers
are Pixinguinha and Jacob do Bandolim with 32 and 31
compositions, respectively, together contributing more
than a fifth of all pieces in the songbook. In some cases,
the Choro Songbook accounts for multiple composers,
or composer-lyricist duos, for example Pixinguinha and
Benedito Lacerda.10
3.2. Global keys and metres of pieces
The distribution of global keys for the major and the
minor mode is shown in Figure 5.11 About 63% are in
major and 37% minor. This key distribution reveals that
keys with fewer accidentals are preferred. It is particu-
larly noteworthy that Dm dominates the minor keys with
almost 15.9% occurrence. One interpretation could be
that some keys are more idiomatic for certain instru-
ments, for instance for the clarinet. The vast majority of
the pieces is in 2/4 metre (86.1%) with the remaining
pieces being in 3/4 (10.5%) representing the Valsas,12 or
2/2 (3.4%).
Almada’s observation that simple global keys with few
accidentals and the 2/4 metre are most recurrent is largely
9 Two pieces, ‘Um chorinho em aldeia’ and ‘Chorinho pra você’, appear twice
in the songbooks. Only one instance of each was used for the analyses.
10 Although Lacerda attended recordings with Pixinguinha from 1946 until
1950, they did not compose together. Lacerda is mentioned in the Choro
Songbook as a composer because he was able to do business with editors
in order to promote Pixinguinha’s music. The piece ‘Um a zero’, for instance,
was written by Pixinguinha in 1918 but they didn’t know each other yet (da
Silva & Filho, 1998, p. 148).
11 We largely corroborate the global key frequencies in (Sève, 2015, p. 118),
although he only reports counts for 286 of the 296 pieces of the Choro
Songbook.
12 The only exception is ‘Os três chorões’ (Choro Songbook, volume 1) which is
a Choro in 3/4 but not a Valsa.
8 F. C. MOSS ET AL.
Figure 5. Key distributions percentage in the Choro Songbook. Major modes are displayed in blue bars and minor in orange.
supported by the empirical data, although the key of
E minor is much less common than one would assume
based on his book. The stereotypical Choro piece is thus
in major, has maximally one accidental and is in a 2/4
metre. If it is in minor, it is very likely to be in D minor.
3.3. Key relations within pieces
Apart from these rather superficial observations, we anal-
yse now whether Choro features prototypical modula-
tions within the pieces. To evaluate the relation of keys
within a piece, all keys are expressed relative to the global
key with a Roman numeral, e.g. if a major piece modu-
lates to the dominant key and back to the tonic, the key
relations would be I-V-I. Subsequently, all key changes
(key bigrams) between parts are extracted and counted
for each piece. An overview about all key transitions in
this dataset is shown in Figure 6. It maps the keys and key
changes onto Schoenberg’s map of key relations (Schoen-
berg, 1969), independently for major and minor pieces,
where the width of the arrows represents the estimated
transition probabilities.
Two observations can be made. First, keys that are
close to the tonic (I or Im) are more frequent, although
more distant keys occur occasionally. This corroborates
that closely related keys are preferred. Second, the com-
parison of the major and minor key patterns shows that
pieces in minor keys modulate to more keys which are
also more distant than in major. The most common key
transitions are between the tonic and its relative and
subdominant keys in major, and between the tonic and
its relative and parallel keys in minor. Finally, modu-
lations to the dominant key (V), which are common-
place in Western classical music, are rather rare in both
modes. This is particularly noteworthy since Almada’s
prime pattern for modulations in the major mode does
include the dominant key at a prominent position (see
Table 1). We attribute this finding to the influence of other
non-classical genres such as Rock and Jazz on Choro.
Unfortunately, recent corpus studies on these genres do
not report statistics on key transitions within pieces
(Broze & Shanahan, 2013; de Clercq & Temperley, 2011)
so that more exact conclusions can not be drawn at this
point.
3.4. Formal arrangement within pieces
Given that Choro pieces modulate most often to keys that
are close to the tonic by fifths or thirds, and that local key
changes also define the parts of a piece, we expect not
only to see recurrent key pairs, but that there is only a
small number of patterns that govern the overall struc-
ture of a piece. For an example, see Figure 4. The corpus
exhibits quite a diverse distribution of part lengths, as is
shown in Figure 7. There are three peaks at length 16, 30,
and 32 bars. Among all 786 parts in the corpus, the 258
32-bar parts (33% of all parts in the data) and the 59 16-
bar parts (7.5% of all parts) stand out in particular. Note
that the frequencies of lengths are shown on a logarith-
mic scale. The 83 irregular parts of length 30 bars (10.6%
of all parts) can, for instance, occur, when repetition and
da capo patterns are involved. All other part lengths are
much less frequent.
We expect to see in particular two-part and three-
part forms to be prevalent. Figure 8 lists the most fre-
quent patterns of formal arrangement that occur more
than 1% in the entire dataset, sorted by their rank.
Almada’s table of key transitions (Table 1) suggests that
pieces follow a small number of prototypes and are either
in three-part (A-B-A-C-A) or two-part (A-B-A) form.
Indeed, both in major and minor pieces the most com-
mon patterns are found in this table. In major, by far the
most common pattern is ‘I-VIm-I-IV-I’ (three-part
form). It occurs 30.3% of the time and is the second pat-
tern in Almada’s table, although it is not clear whether
Almada’s table is to be read as a ranked list. It is followed
 JOURNAL OF NEW MUSIC RESEARCH 9

Figure 6. Modulations in the Choro Songbook projected to Schoenberg’s (1969) map of key relations. The vertical axis corresponds to
the line of fifths and the horizontal axis to alternating relative and parallel keys, but only the keys that occur in the corpus are shown. The
arrow strengths are proportional to the frequency of occurrence of a key transition in the corpus.

Figure 7. Absolute frequencies of part lengths in the dataset on a logarithmic scale.

by ‘I’ (non-modulating, 12.4%), and ‘I-X-I’ (rounded
binary), where ‘X’ can be the relative (VIm, 12.4%), sub-
dominant (IV, 10.8%), or parallel (Im, 6.5%) key and
thus be understood as a shortened version of the three-
part form. Almada’s second prototypical form is the most
common three-part form but ranked sixth with only 6%
among all formal patterns in major. The two most com-
mon key patterns in minor are ‘Im-III-Im-I-Im’
(three-part) with modulations to the relative (III) and
the parallel (I) keys, and ‘Im-III-Im’ (20%), followed
by ‘Im-I-Im’ (19.1%, both two-part), and the non-
modulating ‘Im’ (11.9%). All percentages are relative to
the number of pieces per mode.
It is furthermore surprising that the second ranking
key pattern in major does not modulate at all. Regard-
ing the two-part pieces (A-B-A), the sum of the third,
fourth, and fifth key patterns in major is 28.8% and the
sum of the second and third in minor is 38.7%. Contrary
to Almada’s assertion that two-part forms are the excep-
tion, it becomes clear that the pieces with two different
parts play an important role for the genre. Almada prob-
ably did not consider this aspect because of his focus on
older composers such as Pixinguinha and Callado. The
relatively small number of prevalent formal patterns fits
well with a musical genre that allows for improvisation
and largely takes place in the context of social gatherings
where the distinction between performers and audience
can not always be strictly drawn. Accordingly, a small
number of standard patterns facilitates the participation
of musicians during a performance.
3.5. Harmonic patterns in 16- and 32-bar parts
Apart from knowing the overall key and formal struc-
ture of a piece, a successful performance also needs to
10 F. C. MOSS ET AL.
Figure 8. Most frequent formal arrangements and key patterns
of transitions between sections in major (top) and minor pieces
(bottom), respectively. Only patterns with a relative frequency
greater than 1% are shown (linear scale).
coordinate the harmonies within a part of a piece espe-
cially when songbooks or leadsheets are not available.
Accordingly, it is also expected to find strong regular-
ities on the level of parts. Despite the variety in part
lengths (see Figure 7), the largest number of parts in
Choro is regular and either 16 or 32 bars long. For an
example see Figure 4, where both PartA and PartB are
32-bar parts and PartA is a repetition of a 16-bar sub-
part (the combination of P1 and P2). Almada (2006, pp.
20–23) provides two tables for the six most common 16-
bar phrases in major and the four most common 16-bar
phrases in minor which are reproduced in Table 2.
All patterns end with a I chord in bar 16 (in major
as well as in minor), whereas bar 8 always includes a
V chord. In order to compare the bars systematically,
we calculate the redundancy of each bar, as defined
above (see ‘Operationalizations’). Redundancy can here
be interpreted as a measure of how certain one is for a
specific chord symbol to occur in a specific bar in a 16-
bar phrase. It is calculated over the harmonic content that
a bar can contain, regardless whether it is one or several
chords. The maximal redundancy of 1 is achieved when
a bar contains exactly the same chord(s) in all patterns
(in Table 2, these are rows A–F in major, and rows A–D
in minor). The redundancy of a bar is zero if no two pat-
terns contain the same chord in this bar. The redundancy
values for all bars is shown in Figure 9.
One can notice that bars 4, 8 and 16 have very high
redundancies in both modes. In minor, bar 12 has also
high redundancy equal to the value of bar 11 but the val-
ues in minor are only based on four different patterns
(rows A–D in Table 2) and are thus less nuanced than
the ones for major. Nonetheless, bars 11 and 12 overall
feature authentic, evaded, or deceptive cadences, ren-
dering bar 12 a momentary point of harmonic stability
before the phrases conclude in an authentic motion to the
tonic in bar 16. More recently, Ramos (2016) considered
78 parts with 16 bars of 26 pieces by Pixinguinha showing
a similar pattern to Almada’s example. This observation
suggests that (sub-)phrase boundaries are marked har-
monically. From another point of view, the fluctuation of
values can be interpreted as the degree of harmonic sta-
bility, that also shapes a listener’s or accompanist’s predic-
tions through implicit learning (Huron, 2006; Rohrmeier
& Rebuschat, 2012; Tillmann, 2005). If particular bars
in 16-bar parts consistently exhibit high redundancy, the
harmony in these bars is easier to predict for people
familiar with this idiom and may very well guide accom-
paniment or improvisation in a Choro performance.
The prototypical 16-bar patterns in Table 2 contain
only Roman numerals and chord forms, and should thus
be understood as abstractions from the wide range of
chords that are possible in Choro. In fact, the empirical
distributions of 16- and 32-bar phrases contain no exact
duplicates under transposition invariance at all which
renders ranking the most common phrases impossible.
To avoid this pitfall, we apply a per-bar unigram model
as described in ‘Operationalizations’. According to this
model, the five most likely empirical 16-bar phrases for
both major and minor are shown in Table 3 and the five
most likely 32-bar phrases are shown in Table A1 in the
Appendix.
Note that, for both modes, the most likely 16-bar
pattern starts off-tonic with a V7 chord in bar 1. Fur-
thermore, comparing the eighth bar of the empirical
phrases with the theoretical ones shows that it does not
always contain a V chord as Almada suggests, but can also
involve other chords with dominant function, e.g. VII
in minor, and in major even tonic chords. The last bar
involves mostly tonic chords in both modes, but can also
end in a III7 chord which is the dominant of the tonic
 JOURNAL OF NEW MUSIC RESEARCH 11

Table 2. Theoretical prototypical harmonic progressions (Almada, 2006, pp. 20–23).

Major 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
A I-V◦ /II II II-V I IV I V/V V
B V I-V/II V/V-V I V/VI VI V/V V
C I6-III◦ II V I V/VI VI V/III III-V
D I V VI V/VI V/VI V/II V/V V
E I-V I VI-V/VI VI V◦ /III I6 V/V V
F I-V/VI VI-V/II II-V I V/III III V/III III-V
9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
A I-V◦ /II II V/VI VI V◦ /III I6-V/II II-V I
B V I-V/II V/IV IV IV I V/V-V I
C I6-III◦ II V I V/II V/V V I
D I V VI V/VI II-IVm I6-III◦ II-V I
E I-V/VI V/II II-V/II II IV-V◦ /V I4-V/II II-V I
F I-V/VI VI-V/II II-V V/II IV-IVm I-V/II V/V-V I
Minor 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
A I-V I-V/IV IV-V/IV IV I-V IV V V
B V I V/IV IV V/III IV I V
C V I V I V I-V/V Vm V
D I V/V V I I V/III III V
9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
A I-V I-V/IV IV-V/IV IV II I V I
B V/III III V I VI-V I V/V-V I
C V I V I V/V-V I V I
D I V/V V I IV-V I II-V I

Figure 9. Redundancies of 16-bar phrases based on Almada (2006).

in the relative key (VIm) to which Choros in major often
modulate. In minor, the second most likely pattern ends
on a VII7 chord, which is < the dominant of the relative
key in minor (III), also a frequent target for modulation
in the minor mode (compare Figure 6). Although the
empirical chord progressions in Table 3 are more diverse
than the ones given by Almada, one has to bear in mind
that there are 685 unique chord types in total and the vari-
ety is considerably smaller than it could be based on this
vocabulary size. In other words, the regularity is not as
clear as in the theoretical predictions but still impressive
considering the number of possibilities.
So far, we have seen that redundancy indicates a
tight connection between harmony and form because
it tends to be higher towards the end of subphrases
(e.g. bars 1–8, 9–16), at least for Almada’s theoretical
predictions. We have also compared the theoretical 16-
bar phrases of proposed by Almada with the five most
likely phrases according to a unigram model. Does the
result hold for the whole dataset? To investigate this
question, all 16-, and 32-bar parts in the Choro Song-
book Corpus are inspected. We include the 32-bar parts
here, because we assume that most of the 32-bar phrases
are indeed repeated 16-bar phrases as in ‘Canhoto de
Paraíba’ (Figure 4). The redundancy and efficiency (see
‘Operationalizations’) are calculated relative to the size of
the respective parts (N = 16 or 32). Figure 10 shows the
redundancy (dark grey) and efficiency (light grey) values
for each bar. Sixteen-bar parts (60 of 787 parts in total)
have a mean redundancy of 0.4 (black dashed line, top
panel). The lower panel displays efficiency and redun-
dancy for all 257 32-bar parts (mean redundancy 0.52;
black dashed line). Recall that these quantities are com-
plementary and their sum always has to add up to 1. The
bars in Figure 10 are stacked to emphasize this comple-
mentary behaviour.
12 F. C. MOSS ET AL.

Table 3. Top 5 empirical most likely 16-bar phrases.

Major 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
1 V7 I V7 I V7 I V7 I
2 I IIm V7 I IIm V7 I I
3 I IIm7-V7 IV7 III7 II7-V7 I V-II7 V7
4 I IIm7-V7 I/3-bIIIo IIm7-V7 I V-IIIm7 II7/5-II7 V7
5 V7 I III7/3# VIm IIm/3 I V7 I
9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
1 V7 I V7 I V7 I V7 I
2 I IIm V7 I IIm V7 I I
3 I IIm7-V7 IV7-IV7/3 VI/7 IIm/3b-#IVo I/5 IIm7-V7 I
4 I-VIm7 IIm7-V7 I/3-bIIIo IIm7-V7 VI7 IIm-IVm IIm7-V7 I-III7
5 V7 I III7/3# VIm IIm/3 I V7 I-V7-III7
Minor 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
1 V7 Im V7 Im-I7 IVm-IIm7(b5) Im/3 II7/3# V7
2 V7 Im V7 Im-Im7 IV7 VII IV7 VII
3 Im-Im/7 II7(b9)/5-IVm6/3b V7-V/7 Im/3-V7 Im-#VIm7(b5) Vm/3-III7 VI-II7 V7
4 Im-Im/7 IVm/3 V7 Im-V7 Im-Im/7 IVm/3 Im-#VIo-V7 Im-V7
5 IIm7(b5)-V7 Im-Im/7b IVm6/3b-V7 Im-I7 IVm-IIm7(b5) Im-Im/7b II7/5-VI7(b5) V7
9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
1 V7 Im V7 Im-I7 IVm-IIm7(b5) Im/3-Im/7 IVm6/3-V7 Im
2 V7 Im V7 Im-Im7 IV7 VII IV7 VII-VII7
3 Im-Im/7 II7(b9)/5-IVm6/3b V7 Im-I7(b9) IVm-IIm7(b5) Im/3-VI7 bII-V7 Im
4 Im-Im/7 IVm/3 V7 Im-V7 Im-Im/7 IVm/3 Im-#VIo-V7 Im
5 IIm7(b5)-V7 Im-Im/7b IVm6/3b-V7 Im-I7 IVm-IIm7(b5) Im-Im/7b II7/5-VI7(b5) V7

Figure 10. Efficiency (light grey) and redundancy (dark grey) for 16- and 32-bar parts. The dashed line is the mean redundancy.

The dark grey redundancy bars resemble a hyperme-
trical grid (Lerdahl & Jackendoff, 1983) where phrase
boundaries are found at bar numbers that are multiples of
4, such as 4, 8, 16, and, 32. In the 32-bar plot, the highest
redundancy value is in bar 16. This is the last bar before
the repetition, since in many cases the 32-bar sections
consist of a repeated 16-bar phrase. Highest redundancy
means that uncertainty is minimal. This reflects the fact
that bar 16 very often contains varieties of V that lead
back to the beginning in bar 1. The somewhat lower
redundancy (smaller dark grey bar) in bar 32 is due to
the fact that very often modulations to new keys take
place (compare to the transcription in Figure 3). While
the key patterns are quite stable in Choros (see ‘Key rela-
tions within pieces’), the transition from bar 32 to bar 1
of the subsequent phrase is less regular than the transi-
tion from bar 16 to bar 17 which very often is the same
as bar 1 of the same phrase.
Furthermore, it seems that the pattern of redundan-
cies for bars 1 to 16 in 32-bar parts is very similar to the
pattern for bars 17 to 32, indicating a correspondence in
redundancy between bars that are 16 bars apart. To con-
firm that the similar patterns in bars 1–16 and 17–32 are
indeed the result of a repetition, i.e. based on harmonic
similarity, and not just a mere coincidence of similar
redundancy values, we calculate the chord distance (see
‘Operationalizations’) between each pair of bars with a
distance of 16 bars, e.g. bar 1 and bar 17, bar 2 and bar 18,
up to bar 16 and bar 32. If two bars contain exactly the
same chords, their distance is zero.

Table 4. Root interval classes and their relative frequencies in 32-
bar phrases.
droot IC Name Frequency
0 P1/P8 Unison/octave
1 P4/P5 Perfect fourth/perfect fifth
2 M2/m7 Major second/minor seventh
3 m3/M6 Minor third/major sixth
4 M3/m6 Major third/minor sixth
5 m2/M7 Minor second/major seventh
6 A4/d5 Augmented fourth/diminished fifth
7 A1/d8 Augmented unison/diminished octave
8 A5/d4 Augmented fifth/diminished fourth
9 A2/d7 Augmented second/diminished seventh
10 A6/d3 Augmented sixth/diminished third
11 A3/d6 Augmented third/diminished sixth
12 A7/d9 Augmented seventh/diminished second
Not accounting for octave differences, which is impos-
sible with Roman numerals, the distance between roots
can be expressed in terms of interval classes (IC). Table 4
shows a range of interval classes and corresponding
values of droot and their names, encompassing dia-
tonic (0–6), chromatic (7–11) and enharmonic (12) inter-
val classes.
The last column of Table 4 shows the relative frequen-
cies of these root distances in the Choro Songbook Corpus.
Clearly, most of the time chords in 32-bar phrases that
are 16 bars apart have the same root (droot = 0) and
the second most common relation between roots is a
fifth relation (droot = 1). Other intervals are much less
frequent.
The actual distance d(c1 , c2 ) between two chords c1
and c2 that are 16 bars apart is calculated as the weighted
sum of several features (see ‘Operationalizations’). More-
over, while the root distance can vary greatly (Table 4
shows values up to 12), the other feature distances are
much more restricted: The chord type metric is either 0 or
1, as is the bass metric, and since no chord in the dataset
contains more than three extensions, the chord alter-
ations metric is at most 6. The observed chord distances
are shown in Figure 11; error bars represent standard
deviations from the mean. To interpret these values, it
is important to note that, despite the obvious variabil-
ity, no pair of bars in 32-bar phrases exceeds an average
chord distance of .5, a consequence of the interval class
frequencies in Table 4. The average chord distance across
all sixteen chord pairs is even lower with a value of .288.
This leads us to conclude that the two halves of most
32-bar phrases are indeed close variants of each other and
in virtually all cases have the same root.
Furthermore, this corroborates the oberservation
made with respect to Figure 10 that there is a tight rela-
tionship between the harmonic content of bars and their
hypermetrical position, in other words between harmony
and form. High redundancy values for bars at the end of
JOURNAL OF NEW MUSIC RESEARCH 13
subphrases (bars 8, 16, 24, 32) entail that the harmonic
content of these bars is less uncertain than in the other
bars and hence easier to predict for musicians and lis-
.648 teners (Huron, 2006; Rohrmeier, 2013). In addition to
.154 the regularity in the modulation patterns within Choro
.040
.073 pieces (Figure 8) there are strong regularities regarding
.021 the harmony in the 16- and 32-bar phrases which make
.018
.014
up a large part of all pieces (Figure 7). Taking these
.019 results together one can conclude that a mental hierar-
.003 chical representation of the form and the hypermetrical
.004
.005 structure facilitate the prediction of the harmony in a
.001 particular bar in Choro and other genres (including Jazz
–
and Classical music). This might be particularly relevant
because improvisation is part of the performance and
musicians often do not rely on scores but play by ear, also
relying on their implicit knowledge about stylistic regu-
larities. The tree-representation in Figure 4 can, in this
view, be understood as an approximation of the cogni-
tive representation of the formal arrangement of Choro
pieces.
3.6. Short harmonic patterns
We have seen that 16- and 32-bar phrases are highly reg-
ular with respect to harmony. Which chords occur most
often in Choro? Which harmonic patterns are preva-
lent? The relative frequency of chords and chord pat-
terns in the dataset can answer questions about central
chords and chord pattenrns (Moss et al., 2019). Recall
that the considerable size of the chord vocabulary (685
unique chord tokens) is partly due to minor variations
of the same chord, such as adding chord extensions or
specifying a bass note and thus the chord inversion. It
is common in music theory to subsume these similar
chord instances under a more general category (Bur-
goyne et al., 2013). Here, we group chords together that
have the same root and the same type, i.e. V7 and
V7(b9) are grouped into a V category, and IIm7 and
IIm7(b5) are categorised into IIm. Based on this
categorisation, Figure 12 shows the 20 most frequent
chords (unigrams, top row) and short harmonic patterns
(bigrams, trigrams, and quadrigrams, rows two to four)
for the major (left column) and the minor mode (right
column). Note that the horizontal axes are on different
scales.
First, one can observe that these short patterns con-
stitute large proportions of the whole dataset. The 20
reduced chord categories account for almost the com-
plete dataset, for 96% in major, and for 94% in minor.
Increasing the size of the harmonic patterns to bigrams,
trigrams and quadrigrams, approximately corresponds to
diminishing this proportion to half (53% in major and
minor), a quarter (27% in major, 25% in minor), and an
14 F. C. MOSS ET AL.
eighth (14% in major, 12% in minor) of the data. While
this is a strong decrease, it holds that a relatively small
number of patterns accounts for large portions of the
data, a finding consistent with other studys on musical
datasets (Arthur, 2017; Mauch et al., 2008; Rohrmeier
& Cross, 2008; White, 2013; Zanette, 2006). More con-
cretely, the by far most common chords in both major
and minor are the ones on scale degrees I and V, although
the dominant is somewhat more common than the tonic
in the minor mode. For both modes, the two most com-
mon bigrams are V-I and V-Im, respectively. This is
interesting and not trivial. In a linguistic text, the two
most common terms could be ‘the’ and ‘a’ but one would
hardly find any bigrams ‘the a’ or ‘a the’. Hence, the fact
that common unigrams also form parts of the most com-
mon n-grams with larger n is indicative of the central role
of these harmonies and corresponding strong regularities
in the underlying harmonic language.
The top ranks among the bigrams are occupied
by progressions of fifths, e.g. V-I, IIm-V, I-V, and
II-V in major, and V-Im, V-I, Im-V, II-V, and
I-IVm in minor. But note also that repetitions (e.g.
I-I and Im-Im) occur frequently. These are due to
the reduced chord representation and correspond, for
example, to resolutions of chord extensions or changes
in the bass note (chord inversion). The most common
tri- and quadrigrams clearly show the prevalence of
cadential patterns, such as IIm-V-I and VI-IIm-V-I
in major, and IVm-V-I and Im-II-V-Im in minor.
The other class of frequent harmonic patterns could
be subsumed under dominant-tonic alternations, e.g.
I-V-I and V-I-V-I in major, and Im-V-Im and
V-Im-V-Im in minor. These interpretations support the
characterisation that the core of harmonic patterns found
in Choro consists predominantly of authentic progres-
sions. In this regard, Choro seems to be more similar
to Jazz that also largely consists of falling-fifths patterns
(Broze & Shanahan, 2013; Rohrmeier, 2020) than to Rock
where ascending fifths are more prominent (de Clercq
Figure 11. Chord distances between the harmonic content of bars that are 16 bars apart in 32-bar phrases. Error bars represent standard
deviations from the mean.
& Temperley, 2011; Temperley & de Clercq, 2013). It
is an interesting observation that local harmonic pro-
gressions in the present corpus follow different patterns
than the larger harmonic key patterns (see ‘Key rela-
tions within pieces’). On a small scale, harmonic progres-
sions in Choro are largely determined by dominant-tonic
progressions while, on a larger scale, subdominant, rela-
tive, and parallel relationships prevail. This implies that
harmony in Choro operates differently on the global (key
relations of sections) and the local (chord transitions in
and between phrases) level.
3.7. Chord types and tokens
In order to study whether chords on certain scale degrees
appear predominantly as a certain type (e.g. as triads, as
seventh chords, or with alterations or bass notes), we tal-
lied the distribution of all chords on a fixed scale-degree
and grouped them by mode (major and minor).
Inspecting all scale degrees in major (see the top left
panel in Figure 12), we find that scale degrees I, IIm, IV
indeed occur most commonly as triads. Scale degree III,
on the other hand, occurs most frequently as III7. It is
very likely that Almada analysed it as V7/VIm (e.g. E7
as the dominant of Am in C major), so that he did not
include it in his list. IIIm is the second most common type
of scale degree III. Analogously, scale degree VI appears
most common as VI7, but could have been interpreted
by Almada as V7/IIm. The second most frequent chord
type of scale degree VI is VIm. In minor (cf. top right
panel in Figure 12), the data agree with Almada in that
scale degrees I and IVm are most frequently triadic. Scale
degree III surprisingly appears most commonly as III7
which could also be read as V7/VI (e.g. Eb7 as the domi-
nant to Ab in C minor). The major triad on the sixth scale
degree ranks only fourth, with VI7, VIm, and VIm7 being
more common. The supertonic scale degree II occurs
mostly as II7 which can be analysed as V7/V, and second
 JOURNAL OF NEW MUSIC RESEARCH 15

Table 5. Number of types, number of tokens, and efficiency for all

diatonic Roman numerals (RN) in major and minor, respectively.
Mode SD Types Tokens TTR Efficiency
Major I 65 7949 0.008 0.479
Major II 46 3957 0.012 0.551
Major III 43 1674 0.026 0.633
Major IV 51 2495 0.020 0.673
Major V 54 5674 0.010 0.398
Major VI 42 2709 0.016 0.549
Major VII 35 725 0.048 0.554
Minor I 68 4950 0.014 0.542
Minor II 47 1834 0.026 0.613
Minor III 50 850 0.059 0.717
Minor IV 52 1909 0.027 0.650
Minor V 57 3373 0.017 0.413
Minor VI 60 1207 0.050 0.624
Minor VII 37 576 0.064 0.681

VII, on the other hand, occurs only 576 times in minor,

which might justify such a statement. In general, these
calculations confirm Almada’s assumption for these scale
degrees but also give a much more detailed picture. We
compared the distribution of types for all scale degrees
by measuring their normalised entropy, or efficiency (see
‘Operationalizations’). An efficiency value of 0 means that
there is only one choice for a scale degree (which is the
case for the NC symbol, for instance), whereas a maxi-
mal efficiency value of 1 means that all types are equally
likely. Table 5 shows the number of types, number of
tokens, type-token ratio (TTR), and efficiency values for
all diatonic scale-degrees I, II, III, IV, V, VI, and VII
in major and minor, respectively. Chromatically altered
scale degrees (such as VI, II) are omitted for reasons of
space. The full table is given in Table A2 in the Appendix.
Figure 13 displays the type-token ratio (blue for major,
orange for minor) and efficiency (black dots) for each
scale degree. One can see that the diatonic scale degrees
(I to VII in both major and minor) occupy the leftmost
ranks and thus have both lowest efficiency and type-
token ratio. In fact, both measures are positively corre-
lated (Pearson correlation of r = .71). Scale degrees IV
and III, both in major, are also among the lowest entropy
scale-degrees and hence show a complexity comparable
to the unaltered scale degrees in terms of their efficiency.

3.8. Diachronic usage of chord alterations

Figure 12. Top 20 unigrams, bigrams, trigrams, and quadrigrams
in major (left column) and minor (right column).
most commonly as IIm7(5) (more than 1000 occur-
rences). Therefore, one can hardly agree that II can only
be used ‘with difficulty’ (Almada, 2006). Scale degree
Not all chords in Choro are triads or seventh chords but
have modifications. A chord modification is defined as
either changing notes within a chord (5, 5), adding
notes to a chord (9, 11), or removing notes from a chord
(omit 3). Approximately 10.7% of all chords in the over-
all corpus have one or more chord modifications, not
counting minor or major sevenths. The ranked relative
frequencies of chord modifications in the overall corpus
16 F. C. MOSS ET AL.

Figure 13. Type-token ratio for all scale degrees in major (blue) and minor (orange); black dots represent the efficiency of the type
distribution for a given scale degree. Type-token ratio and efficiency are positively correlated (r = .71).

Figure 14. Occurrence of chord extensions over time shown as black dots. The bars on the left show the absolute frequency of occurrence
on a logarithmic scale.

is shown in the bar plot on the left of Figure 14 on a loga-
rithmic scale. Chord modifications that occur conjointly
have been counted separately, e.g. a V(b9)(b13) chord
symbol would increase the counts for both 9 and 13.
We left the original spelling of the modifications intact
and did not reinterpret enharmonic equivalences, such
as 4 and 5, 6 and 13, or 4 and 11. The distributions
in the larger right plot show their employment over time
as black dots. The continuous distributions represent ker-
nel density estimates for the distribution of the respective
chord modification. For visualisation purposes, the area
of the estimates has been transformed to be proportional
to the modifications’ frequency but on a linear scale. The
vertical position of dots within one chord modification
has purely a visual function. Darker appearing dots are
the result of overlapping points.
It appears to be the case that most modifications occur
more often between the 1940’s and 1990’s, indicating an
increase of the usage of modifications and more complex
chords in more recent compositions which is in line
with our expectations regarding the diachronic change
of chord extension usage. However, this could be due to
the fact that the Choro Songbook contains more pieces
from certain decades and that some pieces are much
longer than others (see Figure 2). To remove this potential
bias, we calculated the proportion of chords with mod-
ifications for each piece and grouped them by decade.
The result is shown in Figure 15. The error bars repre-
sent the standard error of the mean and are only weakly
and not significantly linked to the absolute number of
chords in a decade (Pearson r = .14). Observing the
change in the usage of chord extensions over time by
decade shows a clear historical pattern of almost mono-
tonic increase. Moreover, the variability increases as well,
as indicated by the larger error bars in the second half
of the 20th century in Figure 15. While chord exten-
sions occur only relatively rarely until ca. 1950 with an
almost constant average frequency around 5%, chord

Figure 15. Proportion of chords with modifications (extensions, suspensions) per decade. Error bars show the standard error of the
mean.
extensions occur much more frequently in the follow-
ing decades with a steeper rise between 1950 and 1980.
The most recent Choro compositions from the last two
decades of the 20th century finally exhibit a leap of
chord extension usage to about 30%, strongly supporting
our expectation that external influences from genres like
Jazz led to a heightened employment of more dissonant
chords.
4. Conclusions
This study was conducted in order to provide a quan-
titative style analysis of Choro, a Brazilian instrumen-
tal music genre largely neglected by empirical music
research so far. Based on transcriptions of the Choro
Songbook (Chediak, 2009, 2011a, 2011b), a set of repre-
sentative Choro pieces, we operationalised and evaluated
the qualitative descriptions of the genre in A estrutura do
Choro (Almada, 2006).
Summarizing our results, this corpus study describes
harmony and form and their mutual relationship in
Choro. We provide the empirical distributions of global
keys, and metres and found that the majority of Choros
follow a relatively small number of formal templates that
can be identified as three-part (A-B-A-C-A), two-part
(A-B-A), and non-modulating (A) forms. Parts in Choro
pieces commonly modulate to closely related keys, such
as the subdominant, parallel, and relative, but notably
largely avoid modulations to the dominant. This is con-
trasted by the fact that dominant-tonic progressions con-
stitute overwhelmingly large portions of local harmonic
progressions between chords. The chord alphabet itself
is very rich and can feature dozens of chord types for
a scale degree that go way beyond the basic classes of
triads and sevenths chords by employing a variety of
JOURNAL OF NEW MUSIC RESEARCH 17
chord modifications. The usage of these chord modi-
fications increases over time, indicating an intra-genre
development towards a larger and more complex chord
alphabet. Finally, looking at the chord distributions of
bars in larger phrases (16 or 32 bars) shows a tight rela-
tionship between hypermetrical position and harmonic
variability. The harmonic content of bars at the end of
subphrases with respect to a binary hypermeter is also
more predictable.
While the results of the present study are limited and
only allow to draw conclusions about the structural fea-
tures of harmony and form in this genre, they contribute
to a better understanding of Choro on a quantitative
basis, and augment the music-theoretical treatment of
these issues with exact computational methods. They
show that the empirical data is largely in accordance
with the Almada’s qualitative descriptions which asserts
the representative status of the Choro Songbook Cor-
pus for this genre. Researchers as well as Choro com-
posers and performers alike are invited to incorporate
our results into their own work and elaborate on our
findings. Notably, the hierarchical representation of the
transcriptions of the Choro Songbook Corpus provides
an elegant encoding of the formal arrangement of the
Choro pieces. Since computational research on musical
form still suffers from the lack of reliable corpora, one can
expect this dataset to ameliorate this situation. Another
particularly promising research avenue is the expansion
of the corpus with complementary sources, such as the
scores from the Choro Archive, which would also enable
a much more detailed description of the historical pro-
cess of genre formation, and allow for thorough compar-
isons of the subtle differences between sub-genres. Yet
another direction might be to combine the transcriptions
with audio data from recordings, either contemporary or
18 F. C. MOSS ET AL.
historical, and thus augment the understanding of Choro
by incorporating data from musical performance.
It is to date difficult to exactly test whether the empiri-
cally determined characteristics of Choro are particular
this genre or reflect more general traits of, say, Latin-
American music because appropriate data for compari-
son is virtually non-existent. The most likely candidate
for genre comparison in future research is Jazz (e.g. with
Eremenko et al., 2018; Pfleiderer et al., 2017; Shanahan
& Broze, 2012) which will certainly shed more light on
the relation between harmony and form in Popular music
genres, and which could also be used to more rigorously
study the question whether the degree of improvisation in
a musical genre is somewhat inversely related to the vari-
ability in its forms as we speculated here. The quantitative
methodology of a corpus study applied to this body of
music does not only illuminate important aspects of this
particular genre. It can also be applied to the empirical
characterisation of harmony and form in other musi-
cal styles and might promote similar research projects,
especially in the analysis of lesser researched genres.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Irmãos Vitale Editores Ltda.,
the publisher of the Choro Songbook, and its initiator Almir
Chediak (in memoriam) and editors Mario Sève, Rogério Souza
and Dininho for licencing the rights to publish the Choro Song-
book Corpus. We also would like to thank the members of the
Digital and Cognitive Musicology Lab (DCML) at École Poly-
technique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) as well as the the editor
and two anonymous reviewers for valuable feedback.
Data availability statement
The data that support the findings of this study are openly
available for non-commercial use on the Zenodo reposi-
tory https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3881347.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Funding
Funding for this collaborative project was provided by several
resources: Zukunftskonzept at Technische Universität Dresden
(ZUK 64), funded by the Exzellenzinitiative of the Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG); École Polytechnique Fédérale
de Lausanne (EPFL); Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pes-
soal de Nível Superior (CAPES) of the Brazilian Department
of Education; Erasmus Mundus (Euro Brazilian Window+)
[EB16DM1897]. The authors also thank Claude Latour for
supporting this research through the Latour Chair in Digital
Musicology at EPFL.
ORCID
Fabian C. Moss http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9377-2066
Willian Fernandes Souza http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2798-
8106
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Appendix. Tables

Table A1. Top 5 empirical most likely 32-bar phrases.

Major 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
1 I IIm-IIm7 V7 I III7 VIm-VIm7 II7 V7 I IIm III7 VIm IVm/3b I/5-VI7 II7-V7 I
2 V7 I V7 I V7 I II7 I V7 I V7 I V7 I V7 I
3 I-VI7 IIm V7 I III7 VIm II7 V7 I-VI7 IIm V7 I bVI7 I-VIm II7-V7 I
4 I IIm-IIm7 V7 I III7 VIm II7 V7 I IIm-IIm7 V7 I I7 IV/3-IVm6/3b I/5-V7 I-V7
5 I-V7 I VI7 IIm III7 VIm II7 V7 I-V7 I I7 IV IV-#IVo I/5-VI7 IIm-IVm6/3b-V7 I
17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32
1 I IIm-IIm7 V7 I III7 VIm-VIm7 II7 V7 I IIm III7 VIm IVm/3b I/5-VI7 II7-V7 I
2 V7 I V7 I V7 I II7 I V7 I V7 I V7 I V7 I-I7/7b
3 I-VI7 IIm V7 I III7 VIm II7 V7 I-VI7 IIm V7 I bVI7 I-VIm II7-V7 I
4 I IIm-IIm7 V7 I III7 VIm II7 V7 I IIm-IIm7 V7 I I7 IV/3-IVm6/3b I/5-V7 I-V7
5 I-V7 I VI7 IIm III7 VIm II7 V7 I-V7 I I7 IV IV-#IVo I/5-VI7 IIm-IVm6/3b-V7 I
Minor 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
1 Im IVm V7 Im Im-#VIm7(b5) Vm II7 V7 Im IVm V7 Im IVm6 Im II7-V7 Im
2 Im IVm V7 Im Im-#VIm7(b5) Vm II7 V7 Im IVm V7 Im-I7 IVm Im V7 Im-V7
3 Im-V7 Im I7 IVm IVm-IIm7(b5) Im II7 V7 Im-V7 Im I7 IVm IVm-IIm7(b5) Im II7-V7 Im
4 Im IVm V7 Im-V7 Im-#VIm(b5) Vm II7 V7 Im IVm V7 VIIm6/3b-I7 IVm-IIm(b5) Im II7-V7 Im-V7
5 Im II7 V7 Im-V7 Im-#VIm7(b5) Vm II7 V7 Im II7 V7 I7 IVm-IIm7(b5) Im-Im/7 IVm6/3-V7 Im
17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

JOURNAL OF NEW MUSIC RESEARCH

1 Im IVm V7 Im Im-#VIm7(b5) Vm II7 V7 Im IVm V7 Im IVm6 Im II7-V7 Im
2 Im IVm V7 Im Im-#VIm7(b5) Vm II7 V7 Im IVm V7 Im-I7 IVm Im V7 Im
3 Im-V7 Im I7 IVm IVm-IIm7(b5) Im II7 V7 Im-V7 Im I7 IVm IVm-IIm7(b5) Im II7-V7 Im
4 Im IVm V7 Im-V7 Im-#VIm(b5) Vm II7 V7 Im IVm V7 VIIm6/3b-I7 IVm-IIm(b5) Im II7-V7 Im-VII7
5 Im II7 V7 Im-V7 Im-#VIm7(b5) Vm II7 V7 Im II7 V7 I7 IVm-IIm7(b5) Im-Im/7 IVm6/3-V7 Im-VII7

21
22 F. C. MOSS ET AL.

Table A2. Number of types and tokens, type-token ratio (TTR),

and efficiency for all chord types in the dataset, sorted by TTR, as
in Figure 13.
Mode SD Types Tokens TTR Efficiency
Major NC 1 141 0.007 –
Major I 65 7949 0.008 0.479
Major V 54 5674 0.010 0.398
Minor NC 1 87 0.011 –
Major II 46 3957 0.012 0.551
Minor I 68 4950 0.014 0.542
Major VI 42 2709 0.016 0.549
Minor V 57 3373 0.017 0.413
Major IV 51 2495 0.020 0.673
Minor II 47 1834 0.026 0.613
Major III 43 1674 0.026 0.633
Minor IV 52 1909 0.027 0.65
Major #IV 16 547 0.029 0.39
Major bIII 20 558 0.036 0.556
Major VII 35 725 0.048 0.554
Minor VI 60 1207 0.050 0.624
Minor III 50 850 0.059 0.717
Major bVII 24 399 0.060 0.658
Minor VII 37 576 0.064 0.681
Major bII 21 304 0.069 0.76
Major bVI 23 297 0.077 0.706
Major #I 9 115 0.078 0.608
Minor #VI 21 254 0.083 0.692
Major #II 7 84 0.083 0.336
Minor #II 2 23 0.087 0.426
Minor bII 28 273 0.103 0.77
Minor #IV 17 156 0.109 0.534
Major #VI 12 102 0.118 0.786
Major bV 11 84 0.131 0.742
Minor #I 12 78 0.154 0.753
Minor bVI 12 77 0.156 0.806
Major bI 5 32 0.156 0.455
Minor bIII 15 94 0.160 0.605
Minor bV 14 82 0.171 0.833
Major #V 7 38 0.184 0.526
Minor bVII 16 84 0.190 0.801
Minor bI 12 55 0.218 0.904
Minor #III 20 86 0.233 0.877
Major #III 7 29 0.241 0.816
Minor #V 7 27 0.259 0.866
Minor #VII 13 49 0.265 0.921
Major #VII 2 7 0.286 0.863
Major bIV 4 9 0.444 0.918
Minor bIV 6 13 0.462 0.933
Minor ##VI 1 1 1.000 –