Harmony, Tuning & Musical Form

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Abstractions about pitch, tuning, chord structure, cadence, meter, and tonal organization. They include microtonality and temperament, chord progressions and roots, octave and complement relations, compositional interpolation, ringing patterns, and symbolic music representations.

24 abstractions in this family — domain-specific abstractions that sit near one another in structural-signature space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Angular harp — Classify an open harp whose straight neck joins the resonator or its extension at a distinct acute or near-right angle, rather than continuing as the smooth arch of an arched harp or closing with a forepillar.
• Bar-line shift — A jazz improvisation technique that displaces the perceived harmonic change across the notated measure boundary.
• Blind octave — A keyboard texture that simulates rapid octave doubling by alternating notes between upper and lower octaves or omitting alternating tones from octave pairs.
• Breedsma — The microtonal interval with frequency ratio 2401:2400, about 0.72 cents, arising as the difference between particular septimal intervals and tempered out in several equal temperaments.
• Bridge chord — A bitonal sonority associated with Frank Bridge that superposes a major and minor triad separated by a characteristic semitone or whole-tone relation and sharing a mediant region under the cited analysis.
• Change ringing — A bell-ringing practice generating controlled permutations of a tuned bell set through memorized methods or conductor-called exchanges.
• Chord progression — An ordered succession of chords whose harmonic relations establish, prolong, redirect or destabilize tonal and modal expectations.
• Chord-scale system — A jazz-improvisation framework that associates each chord or harmonic function with one or more scales supplying available chord tones, tensions and avoid-note judgments.
• Complement (music) — A pitch-class or interval relation in which one musical object combines with another to complete a declared total such as an octave or chromatic aggregate.
• Corelli cadence — A clash cadence in which an anticipated tonic sounds against a leading tone or supertonic immediately before resolution, producing a characteristic major- or minor-second dissonance.
• Interpolation (classical music) — The insertion of additional, functionally nonessential material between two otherwise successive formal functions, extending a phrase, period or liturgical item.
• Lipps–Meyer law — A historical music-perception hypothesis that a melodic interval sounds more final when its terminal tone occupies a power-of-two relation in the interval’s frequency ratio.
• Microtonality — The composition, tuning or performance of music using pitch intervals smaller than a conventional semitone or otherwise outside the prevailing twelve-tone equal-tempered pitch grid.
• Otonality and utonality — Harry Partch's paired just-intonation chord concepts: otonalities share a denominator and follow an overtone series, while utonalities share a numerator and mirror a subharmonic series.
• Pitch class — The equivalence class of musical pitches related by whole-octave displacement.
• Quarter tone — A musical interval approximately half a semitone, or one step of a 24-part equal division of the octave when used in 24-tone equal temperament.
• Ring Tone Text Transfer Language — Encode a monophonic ringtone as a three-part text string containing a name, default duration–octave–tempo settings, and an ordered note/rest sequence.
• Root (chord) — The pitch class that names and structurally organizes a chord as the origin of its interval stack, regardless of which chord tone sounds lowest.
• Rule of the octave — A thoroughbass convention assigning characteristic harmonies to each ascending and descending scale degree in a bass octave.
• Septuple meter — A musical meter organizing each measure into seven equal beats or subdivisions, commonly grouped as combinations of two, three and four.
• So What chord — A five-note jazz voicing built as three stacked perfect fourths topped by a major third, named for its prominent use in Miles Davis's So What.
• Subminor and supermajor — Microtonal interval categories lying respectively between diminished and minor and between major and augmented intervals under a stated tuning system.
• Tonic sol-fa — A movable-do sight-singing pedagogy and notation that names pitches by scale-degree function relative to the current tonic.
• Wolf tone — An unstable, warbling note on a bowed-string or related resonant instrument produced when string excitation strongly couples to a nearby body resonance, causing competing vibration regimes rather than a steady fundamental.