Key Characteristics of Hymns

Abstract

The authors propose a way of patterning the bars of monophonic melodies in hymns and finding keys from such patterns. The authors represent monophonic melody bars on a vector showing the duration of pitch chroma contained in each bar. In experiments, the authors patterned bars of 352 four/four beat hymns, defined the distance between the bar key and melody, and found they key from this, correctly 83.1% of the time. The authors also propose a way to determine the maximum likelihood of a contaminated normal distribution of distance between patterns using an EM algorithm. Key characteristics of hymns were then studied using this method.