Britten’s Tonal Patterns
The Britten Pears Foundation maintains a Thematic Catalogue of works of British composer Benjamin Britten: a detailed database of all of Britten’s works including manuscript sources, incipits and other related material.
The catalogue does not yet contain digitised musical scores, but the curators were interest in the potential benefit of such data for research into Britten’s music.
I designed a visualisation tool which allows a research to analyse and compare tonal patterns across songs and song cycles. After selecting a song, users can ‘brush’ a representation of the tonal sequence, which highlights corresponding sequences in other songs.
The tools allows users to discover the structure and patterns of individual songs, as well as co-occurrences of similar patterns across different compositions. Typical – as well as unusual – patterns can be identified.