The Characteristics of Japanese Favorite Songs

Tonality

Abstract

The nature of the Japanese favorite songs becomes to be gradually clear by the recent research works. In the subject of these research works, “Tonality and Tonic (key note)” of the music (T & T) has been attracted a great deal of attention as an important index to determine the character of music. This paper deals with tonal structure recognition method of Japanese favorite songs using information about pitch name and time-duration that appear on musical score (sample data 2, 777 pieces, 274, 737 notes). As a result, the remarkable characters were found. For example, T & T can be recognized with approximately 90 % accuracy by statistical pitch information of the music score. The time-duration dose not play an important role to infer the T & T.