When describing tonal attraction, metaphors referring to physical forces can be powerful tools, leading to so called cadential forces. Apart from that, Hilbert space models for tonal attraction have found their way into music theory recently. The paper at hand takes up two approaches: A group around Daniel Harrison has developed a theory of cadence that can be embedded into the concept of cadential forces. The present paper moreover contributes to a previous attempt to model tonal attraction using a qubit system by extending this model, in view of Harrison's theory, to a two-component system in which the relevant forces for a minimal cadence consisting of two chords only are considered adequately. As a result, numerical values for cadential forces can be computed so that various types of authentic and plagal cadences can be compared quantitatively. The resulting scale of cadential forces is finally used to discuss and evaluate the proposed model.
Read full abstract