phaidra.bruckneruni.at o:3897 DOI 10.17613/4crx-fr36 Towards a unified model of chords in Western harmony Chord-based harmony is an important aspect of many types of Western music, across genres, regions, and historical eras. However, the consistent representation and comparison of harmony across a wide range of styles (e.g., classical music, Jazz, Rock, or Pop) is a challenging task. Moreover, even within a single musical style, multiple theories of harmony exist, each relying on its own (possibly implicit) assumptions and leading to harmonic analyses with a distinct focus (e.g., on the root of a chord vs. its bass note) or representation (e.g., spelled vs. enharmonic pitch classes). Cross-stylistic and cross-theory comparisons are therefore even more difficult, particularly in a large-scale computational setting that requires a common overarching representation. To address these problems, we propose a model which allows for the representation of chords at multiple levels of abstraction: from chord realizations on the score level (if available), to pitch-class collections (including a potential application of different equivalences, such as enharmonic or octave equivalence), to pitch- and chord-level functions and higher-order abstractions. Importantly, our proposed model is also well-defined for theories which do not specify information at each level of abstraction (e.g., some theories make no claims about harmonic function), representing only those harmonic properties that are explicitly included and inducing others where possible (e.g., deriving scale degrees from root and key information). Our model thus represents an important step towards a unified representation of harmony and its various applications. eng digital humanities music annotation chord model corpus research graphs harmonic analysis 2025-05-08T11:35:06.051Z LOMv1.0 Author BEGIN:VCARD VERSION:3.0 N:Hentschel;Johannes; FN:Johannes Hentschel X-ORCID:https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1986-9545 END:VCARD BEGIN:VCARD VERSION:3.0 N:Neuwirth;Markus; FN:Markus Neuwirth X-ORCID:https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1990-052X END:VCARD BEGIN:VCARD VERSION:3.0 N:Moss;Fabian C.; FN:Fabian C. Moss X-ORCID:https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9377-2066 END:VCARD BEGIN:VCARD VERSION:3.0 N:McLeod;Andrew; FN:Andrew McLeod X-ORCID:https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2700-2076 END:VCARD BEGIN:VCARD VERSION:3.0 N:Rohrmeier;Martin; FN:Martin Rohrmeier X-ORCID:https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4323-7257 END:VCARD https://w3id.org/kim/hcrt/scheme https://w3id.org/kim/hcrt/text Textdokument Text LOMv1.0 yes https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0 application/pdf 1253446 https://phaidra.bruckneruni.at/o:3897 https://phaidra.bruckneruni.at/api/object/o:3897/thumbnail LOMv1.0 discipline