A Graph-Theoretical Approach to the Harmonic Analysis of Georgian Vocal Polyphonic Music

The present paper proposes a computational approach to the comparative analysis and visualization of the harmonic structure of three-voiced vocal music. The dataset which has been used in this study is the same as in Scherbaum et al. (2015), a corpus of polyphonic songs from Svaneti (Akhobadze, 1957). Similar to the earlier work, a song is treated as a discrete temporal process in which harmonic or melodic states change according to unknown rules which are implicitely contained in the song itself. In contrast to the prior study, however, there are no assumptions regarding their probabilistic or deterministic nature