[Smt-talk] Data collection for a research project on Schenkerian analysis

[Phillip Kirlin]

Hello everyone,

I am studying statistical regularities that appear in Schenkerian 
analyses; that is, the things people tend to do in an analysis versus 
things they tend not to do.  To find these patterns, I use a computer 
program to tabulate statistics from a corpus of existing Schenkerian 
analyses.  This research has already produced some interesting results 
(see postscript below).

But to do better, I need many more analyses.  I am only using analyses 
of short excerpts of music that have a complete manifestation of the 
Ursatz (at a local level, of course), possibly with an interruption. 
For instance, I am using many examples from Forte & Gilbert's textbook, 
chapters 7-12, where there are lots of excerpts of 8-20 measures in 
length with a complete Ursatz.

Though I am scouring other textbooks and music theory publications, I am 
also reaching out to people on this list who may have analyses in their 
possession that they are willing to contribute to this project.  I 
suspect there are Schenker instructors out there who have done analyses 
as handouts for their classes, or as homework solutions, or who just 
have a large collection of photocopied analyses from other sources. 
These would be extremely helpful to me, and will not be shared with 
anyone else without your permission.  That being said, I would like to 
make as much of the data as I can available to others, and I plan on 
releasing as much of the corpus as possible in a manner so that other 
researchers may access it.

If you have existing graphical analyses of this format (short excerpt of 
music, complete Ursatz) that you are willing to share, please contact me 
off-list at pkirlin at cs.umass.edu.  I will gladly send you SASEs or FedEx 
envelopes so that you may mail things to me (or I'll reimburse you for 
any postage).  Scanned images or PDFs are appreciated as well.  It 
doesn't matter if you have one analysis to contribute or 100; I will 
gladly accept them all.

Many thanks,

Phil Kirlin
University of Massachusetts Amherst
http://www.cs.umass.edu/~pkirlin


P.S.: Current results can be found in my paper that will be presented in 
October at ISMIR in Miami:

   http://www.cs.umass.edu/~pkirlin/papers/kirlin11probabilistic.pdf

Existing analyses in a computer-readable format can be found at

   http://www.cs.umass.edu/~pkirlin/schenker