Using corpus studies to find the origins of the madrigal
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Date
2021-12-16
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Publisher
Ohio State University. Libraries
Abstract
A recurring topic in musicology is the origin of the madrigal. Did it come from the frottola, the motet and chanson, or other Italian traditions? MS Florence, BNC, 164-167 (c. 1520) has four sections, each devoted to a different genre: madrigals, other Italian-texted genres, chansons, and motets. These sections provide evidence of genre classification from the period. We encoded the 82 pieces in the manuscript and used jSymbolic to extract 801 features from each file. We then used Weka to train classifiers to identify the pieces in the different sections. This allowed us to test the claims of earlier scholars as to similarity or difference between the madrigals and the other genres. The classifiers could distinguish the other Italian-texted genres from the madrigals only 72% of the time, compared to 100% of the time for the motets and chansons, suggesting that the madrigals are more similar to other Italian-texted pieces than to the other genres. Features based on rhythm were particularly effective in separating the genres, especially in discriminating madrigals from motets.
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Keywords
madrigal, corpus studies, machine learning, genre, feature extraction, musical style
Citation
Future Directions of Music Cognition (2021), pp. 38-42