Marco Buongiorno Nardelli
London E1W 1YW, UK
Portland, ME 04101
2nd floor
11th floor
Boston, MA 02115
2nd floor
London E1W 1LP, UK
Talk recording
The abstraction of musical structures (notes, melodies, chords, harmonic or rhythmic progressions, etc.) as mathematical objects in a geometrical space is one of the great accomplishments of contemporary music theory. Building on this foundation, I generalize the concept of musical spaces as networks and
derive functional principles of compositional design by the direct analysis of the network topology. This approach provides a novel framework for the analysis and
quantification of similarity of musical objects and structures, and suggests a way to relate such measures to the human perception of different musical entities. Finally,
the analysis of a single work or a corpus of compositions as complex networks provides alternative ways of interpreting the compositional process of a composer
by quantifying emergent behaviors with well-established statistical mechanics techniques. In particular, I will demonstrate how tonal harmony, or any other
compositional framework, emerges naturally as a property of the network topology.