Modeling Stylistic Co-evolution in Symbolic Music Heritage Collections

2026-07-26

AI Summary

This study proposes an analytical framework that bridges representation and dynamics to quantitatively model the diachronic co-evolution of cross-cultural stylistic traditions in Western art music, eschewing static categorization or oversimplified similarity measures. Methodologically, it constructs contextual embeddings from symbolic chord sequences, projects musical works into a shared harmonic semantic space, and employs a temporal causal Kalman filter to reconstruct national-level stylistic trajectories. Building on this, DeGroot and Friedkin–Johnsen models of social dynamics are introduced to characterize mechanisms of stylistic influence and anchoring. Evaluated on 480 compositions from 1875–1940, the framework recursively predicts stylistic evolution during 1930–1940 with high fidelity to established music-historical accounts—such as the close linkage of German-Austrian traditions and the interaction between Russian and French styles. This work pioneers the application of opinion dynamics models to music evolution, yielding interpretable influence networks and anchoring estimates, thereby offering a reproducible quantitative pathway for cultural heritage analysis.

Abstract

Digitized musical heritage collections offer new opportunities to examine how stylistic traditions change over historical time, but computational analyses often reduce musical works to static classifications or similarity scores. This article proposes a representation-to-dynamics framework for studying cross-cultural harmonic change in Western art music. Starting from symbolic chord sequences, we derive contextual chord embeddings, project work-level representations into a shared harmonic space, and reconstruct country-level trajectories through temporally causal Kalman filtering. These trajectories are then modeled with DeGroot and Friedkin--Johnsen dynamics, yielding interpretable influence-like networks and estimates of stylistic anchoring. We apply the framework to a curated corpus of 480 dated works from 1875 to 1940 across Russia, France, Germany, Austria, and a heterogeneous ''Others'' group. Models fitted on 1875--1925 are evaluated through recursive forecasts for 1930--1940, testing whether the estimated dependency structure remains informative across a potentially changing historical and stylistic regime. The estimated trajectories and influence patterns are broadly consistent with established music-historical accounts of late Romantic and early modernist exchange, including the close relationship between German and Austrian traditions and historically plausible cross-currents between Russian and French traditions. PCA-variance-weighted estimation provides modest improvements while preserving a single interpretable influence network. Rather than treating the estimated matrices as direct causal evidence, the framework offers a reproducible quantitative layer for cultural heritage research, complementing archival and musicological interpretation.

Problem

• stylistic co-evolution
• symbolic music
• harmonic change
• cultural heritage
• historical dynamics

Innovation

• contextual chord embeddings
• Kalman filtering
• DeGroot dynamics
• stylistic co-evolution
• harmonic trajectory