key-profiles · yust2024-tonality-racism

Most germane to the present discussion, pitch-class vectors are a common tool for automatically detecting the key of a piece of music. Much empirical research, including well-known and influential work of Krumhansl (1990), Temperley (2001), Aarden (2003), and Sapp (2011), treats macroharmony as the essential defining feature of keys, and by extension tonality. ... are often characterized as “tonal hierarchies” in the sense that they assign pitch-classes to three or four categories: non-scale tones, scale tones not in the tonic triad, and members of the tonic triad