Analysis of musical structures: an approach utilising monadic parser combinators

The work of this thesis seeks to further the use of computation in musical analysis. To a lesser extent it is hoped that it will provide some little evidence of a new angle on creating analytic elements through inference, and cast light onto some areas where analysis may be used anew. Parsers for musical information are small in number, none have been implemented in functional languages, nor using monadic combination techniques. Few analytic systems are capable of, or even consider it necessary to, represent semantic ambiguity, and this is even more true of parsing systems. The work herein presented provides a system of unique monadic parsers built on combination that are capable of delivering several different types and depths of results. Many computational-analytic systems are based on theories of similarity. The work presented here provides for analytic structures to be created through inference i.e. in the absence of known structures. This is believed to be the first instance of this type of structure generation in the field of music