Probabilistic Multilabel Graphical Modelling of Motif Transformations in Symbolic Music

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Taieb, Ron, Greenberg, Yoel, Sober, Barak
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Taieb, Ron
Greenberg, Yoel
Sober, Barak
author_facet Taieb, Ron
Greenberg, Yoel
Sober, Barak
contents Motifs often recur in musical works in altered forms, preserving aspects of their identity while undergoing local variation. This paper investigates how such motivic transformations occur within their musical context in symbolic music. To support this analysis, we develop a probabilistic framework for modeling motivic transformations and apply it to Beethoven's piano sonatas by integrating multiple datasets that provide melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, and motivic information within a unified analytical representation. Motif transformations are represented as multilabel variables by comparing each motif instance to a designated reference occurrence within its local context, ensuring consistent labeling across transformation families. We introduce a multilabel Conditional Random Field to model how motif-level musical features influence the occurrence of transformations and how different transformation families tend to co-occur. Our goal is to provide an interpretable, distributional analysis of motivic transformation patterns, enabling the study of their structural relationships and stylistic variation. By linking computational modeling with music-theoretical interpretation, the proposed framework supports quantitative investigation of musical structure and complexity in symbolic corpora and may facilitate the analysis of broader compositional patterns and writing practices.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_26478
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Probabilistic Multilabel Graphical Modelling of Motif Transformations in Symbolic Music
Taieb, Ron
Greenberg, Yoel
Sober, Barak
Sound
Methodology
Machine Learning
Motifs often recur in musical works in altered forms, preserving aspects of their identity while undergoing local variation. This paper investigates how such motivic transformations occur within their musical context in symbolic music. To support this analysis, we develop a probabilistic framework for modeling motivic transformations and apply it to Beethoven's piano sonatas by integrating multiple datasets that provide melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, and motivic information within a unified analytical representation. Motif transformations are represented as multilabel variables by comparing each motif instance to a designated reference occurrence within its local context, ensuring consistent labeling across transformation families. We introduce a multilabel Conditional Random Field to model how motif-level musical features influence the occurrence of transformations and how different transformation families tend to co-occur. Our goal is to provide an interpretable, distributional analysis of motivic transformation patterns, enabling the study of their structural relationships and stylistic variation. By linking computational modeling with music-theoretical interpretation, the proposed framework supports quantitative investigation of musical structure and complexity in symbolic corpora and may facilitate the analysis of broader compositional patterns and writing practices.
title Probabilistic Multilabel Graphical Modelling of Motif Transformations in Symbolic Music
topic Sound
Methodology
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.26478