Predicting the Composer and Style of Jazz Chord Progressions

Abstract

Jazz music is a genre that consists mainly of improvising over known tunes, represented as a lead sheet. This study addresses the question ‘to what extent does a lead sheet carry information about its composer?’ Primarily, this study considers chord progressions alone, and secondarily melodic and temporal information combined with various multiple viewpoint models. Using these classifiers, a novel subsequence selection algorithm is presented to trace stylistic similarities within a lead sheet. We conclude that composers can, to a reasonable extent, be recognized from their chord progressions, and that the consideration of melodic and temporal information improves classification accuracy by a small but statistically significant amount.