The Implementation of a Contour Module for Music21

Abstract

In this paper we present a contour module for the Music21 toolkit. The theory of musical contour has operations such as similarly, matrices and reduction that have been used to analyze music from many composers. The contour module can calculate these operations quickly and since the Music21 toolkit reads files in the Humdrum and MusicXML formats, a large corpus of music is available for analysis. To the best of our knowledge, this is the only tool for contour processing available today.

We introduce some background information about the Contour Theory, how the contour module can be used and some contour analysis using Bach’s 371 Chorales.