Computer-Assisted Music Analysis

Useful Links:

Several programs, especially atonal and Set Theory programs, are downloadable from:

This site is called "Software Tools for Music Theory and Analysis" and used to be the site "Music Analysis FTP Server in Berlin" (maintained by P. Castine). It now resides at Queensland Conservatorium, which is part of Griffith University.

Serial Composer is an application which lets the user specify criteria and then searches for 12-tone-series that fulfill the criteria specified by user. Freely distributable (all rights reserved):

The shareware program Matrix Maker X facilitates the creation and formatting of twelve-tone matrices (12 x 12 arrays) as well as the creation and formatting of matrices from 2 x 2 through 12 x 12. It can also analyze the properties of hexachords and complete twelve-tone sets. The authors of the program are planning on including tetrachords and trichords in the future.

Serial Music Row Finder. The user will input the 12 notes of a tone row and the program will calculate all 48 possible forms of the row in a matrix. Freely distributable (all rights reserved):

Alexandros Droseltis is the author of TTRM: it creates musical arrays (row matrices and Stravinskian rotation arrays ---"verticals") as musical scores (TeX format) or square tables (text format) from a single given row. It is also a search machine for pitch class sets (ordered or not) in the row matrix. The application is GUI; the package is maintained on the Werner Icking Music Archive:

and much information about it can be found on the FSF Directory:

Another important Web-site is CTI Music at Lancaster University in the UK. It contains downloadable software not only for analysis, but also for aural and music theory training, composition, performance, sound processing, ethnomusicology, instrumental tutors, notation and scanning software etc.:

Important and powerful is "Humdrum" by David Huron, which comprises a set of general-purpose software tools for music analysis. This includes vertical as well as horizontal analyses. See, among other sites:

"Spectral Modeling Synthesis" is a "set of techniques and software implementations for the analysis, transformation and synthesis of musical sounds" from the Music Technology Group at Pompeu Fabra University. See

POCO is an evolving environment for analyzing musical performances, especially with regard to expressive timing. It is being developed by the "Music, Mind, Machine" research group at Nijmegen Institute for Cognition and Information. See

Larry Solomon authored several analysis tools, e.g. a Schenkerian Primer, a Set Theory Primer, a Web Set Theory Calculator, a Twelve Tone Matrix Machine, etc. See

The Java Set Theory Machine by Jay Tomlin can be found at:

Two Set Finders by Stephen Taylor can be found at:

The Melisma Music Analyzer by Daniel Sleator Davy Temperley can be downloaded from:

kanthume - computer aided analysis. The author, Olivier Lartillot, envisions musical analysis through systematic induction of analogies that integrates melody, harmony and form into a unified framework and suggests new kinds of analysis that could grasp music not understood by traditional analyses: non-occidental, contemporary, electro-acoustic, improvised.

Research on computer-assisted music analysis is one of the goals of the "Forschungsstelle Musik- und Medientechnologie":

Research on Information Structures in Music, specifically on analysis of music via neural networks, is being conducted at ILKD in Karlsruhe (Germany):

Norm Spier maintains a website which shows examples of a type of spectrogram (visual tonal breakdown) of art music recordings. It also explains how they are made, and gives some psychoacoustic information relating to them:

Korean music is being analyzed at the AI Lab at Kyungpook National University (South Korea). The focus is specifically locating and classifying rhythmic patterns vial neural networks:

"MUSANA" is a (German) program by Dirk Uhrlandt and Nico Schüler for the statistical and information theoretical analysis of traditionally notated music. Currently, these analyses are only for each voice separately. An official version of a program component for analysing three voices at a time--and with it also vertical structures--is in preparation. More information and the program are available from the authors. E-mail:

Additional References can be found at: