Functional harmony ontology: Musical harmony analysis with Description Logics

Abstract

Symbolic representations of music are emerging as an important data domain both for the music industry and for computer science research, aiding in the organization of large collections of music and facilitating the development of creative and interactive AI. An aspect of symbolic representations of music, which differentiates them from audio representations, is their suitability to be linked with notions from music theory that have been developed over the centuries. One core such notion is that of functional harmony, which involves analyzing progressions of chords. This paper proposes a description of the theory of functional harmony within the OWL 2 RL profile and experimentally demonstrates its practical use.