Symbolic Representation of Musical Chords: A Proposed Syntax for Text Annotations

In this paper we propose a text represention for musical chord symbols that is simple and intuitive for musically trained individuals to write and understand, yet highly structured and unambiguous to parse with computer programs. When designing feature extraction algorithms, it is important to have a hand annotated test set providing a ground truth to compare results against. Hand labelling of chords in music files is a long and arduous task and there is no standard annotation methodology, which causes difficulties sharing with existing annotations. In this paper we address this problem by defining a rigid, contextindependent syntax for representing chord symbols in text, supported with a new database of annotations using this system.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ISMIR
• Authors: Christopher Harte, Mark B. Sandler, Samer A. Abdallah, Emilia Gómez
• Keywords: Chord Symbols, Hand Annotated Test, Information Retrieval, ISMIR 2005, Musical Chord Symbols