Pop Music for Computer Scientists

Jonathan Chang July 8, 2011

Preliminaries

This document will describe the fundamentals of music theory as it pertains to Western pop music. There is a lot of music which isnt that and some of the information in this document may be useful for that, but I guarantee nothing.

1.1

Notes

For all of the rich variety of music one hears, the constituent pieces are in fact quite simple. At any given moment there are one or more notes being heard. A note is the fundamental unit of sound produced by an instrument and is typically associated with a frequency. Amazingly, all of the notes in Western music across all instruments can be assigned one of 12 labels (Li ) shown in the table below. How to map notes to these labels will be covered later, but for now we assume there is a known function that maps notes N to labels L, (N ) = Li , i 0 . . . 11.

1.2

Scales

A song will typically be restricted to notes which map to a subset of the labels; this subset is known as a key. 0 . . . 11 = {N | (N ) = Li , i K}

K NK

(1) (2)

Keys are often constructed using what we will call a root (R 0 . . . 11) and a avor (F 0 . . . 11),

K Li i C 0 C 1 D 2 D 3 E 4

= F 5

(R + F ) F 6 G 7

mod 12 G 8 A 9 A 10 B 11

(3)

When people refer to a key such as Cmajor, C refers to the root and major refers to the avor. The value of R is found by looking up in the table above, e.g., C = 0. The avor is a subset which must simply be memorized, Fmajor = {0, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11} (4)

Applying the formulas above, we nd that, for example, KCmajor KGmajor = {0, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11} = {0, 2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 11} (5) (6)

1.3

Chords

With a set of admissable notes in place we now explore how those notes can be composed. Popular music can usually partitioned into intervals in which one or more notes from a single chord are being heard; often all of the notes of the chord are played simultaneously. Here, we dene a chord to be a subset of the key1 . C K (7)

Like keys, chords are typically characterized by a root () and a avor (). The formula follows exactly as before, C = ( + ) mod 12 (8)

The only dierence is in the denition of the avors. Popular music primarily uses two avors, major and minor, major minor = {0, 4, 7} = {0, 3, 7} (9) (10)

The constraint that the chord be a subset of the key, along with the denitions of the chords, means that only a subset of chords are admissable in a key. In particular, K since 0 and + 0 mod 12 = C K. This means that for a major key and the avors of chords given above, the uppper bound on the number of admissable chords is no more than 14. For a major key K, major and minor cannot both be admissable for any . This means that the upper bound on the number of admissable chords is no more than 7.
1 There are additional characteristics of a chord which relate to the realization of the chord into notes which we explore later.

R () 0 2 4 5 7 9 11

R (major) 0,4,7 2,6,9 4,8,11 0,5,9 2,7,11 1,4,9 3,6,11

R (minor) 0,3,7 2,5,9 4,7,11 0,5,8 2,7,10 0,4,9 2,6,11

For a major key K with root R, neither major nor minor are admissable when = R + 11 mod 12. Thus the upper bound on the number of admissable chords is no more than 6. We show by construction below that there are exactly 6 admissable for any major scale. To prove the last three statements, it is useful to formulate the denitions in terms of R (i) = i R mod 12. Note that since K = R + F mod 12 (by the rst bullet point), R () F . Further, since the entire chord is a subset of the key, we have that R (C) F . Using these facts, we create the table above with admissable chords (i.e., subsets of F ) bolded. This gives us an easy formula to determine the legal chords in our system. 1. For each F , compute R (). 2. For each value of R (), refer to table nd an admissable C = R ({major, minor}). 3. Derive the chord C using C = C + R mod 12. When using this formula we will dene C() as the chord corresponding to the value of used to generate it.

1.4

Progressions

As mentioned above, songs can be understood as sequences of chords. Within a chosen key, we can determine which chords are admissable. We now need only dene the rules by which chords can be sequences to fully describe a song in broad strokes.