Low dimensional model of tonal pitch space

Abstract

How human brain perceives and processes tones or music as whole is still an active area of research. We focus on low dimensional models that aid the human understanding of auditory space. Most existing models lack intuitive perceptual distance preserving mapping that would simultaneously represent relationships between tones, chords and tonalities. We propose an augmented model and mapping of tone and tonal region space to a visual space that uses improved perceptually uniform mapping from auditory space to visual space compared to existing solutions. The proposed quotient space model is based on existing models derived with dimensionality reduction methods from psychoacoustic data. The model preserves the captured variance of best comparable existing models while the dimensions of the model are easier to interpret compared to existing models.