BeatlesFC: Harmonic function annotations of Isophonics' The Beatles dataset

2026-01-05

arXiv.org

AI Summary

This study addresses the lack of structured harmonic function annotations—such as tonic, dominant, and subdominant—in existing Beatles song datasets, which has hindered the integration of chord progressions with macro-level formal structure. To bridge this gap, the work introduces harmonic function theory systematically into a popular music dataset for the first time, constructing a binary annotation scheme that distinguishes stable (tonic) from unstable (subdominant and dominant) functions grounded in music theory. By combining expert annotations with structural parsing, the research establishes connections between chords and musical form at the phrase level. The resulting resource, BeatlesFC, extends the Isophonics dataset with comprehensive harmonic function labels spanning all Beatles albums, thereby filling a critical gap between chord-level and form-level analysis and offering a valuable new asset for music information retrieval and automated music analysis.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Syntax — Tagging, Chunking & Parsing
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Machine Learning: Feature Construction/Reformulation

Application Category

• Semantics and Knowledge: Representation, semantic annotation, enhancement, enrichments, access and/or integration of a variety of data on the Web
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Data quality aspects of human-annotated datasets
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Large pretrained models with web data

Abstract

This paper presents BeatlesFC, a set of harmonic function annotations for Isophonics'The Beatles dataset. Harmonic function annotations characterize chord labels as stable (tonic) or unstable (predominant, dominant). They operate at the level of musical phrases, serving as a link between chord labels and higher-level formal structures.

Problem

• harmonic function
• chord labels
• musical phrases
• formal structures
• The Beatles dataset

Innovation

• harmonic function
• chord labeling
• musical phrase
• tonal stability
• formal structure