Objective Evaluation of Tonal Fitness for Chord Progressions Using the Tonal Interval Space.

Chord progressions are core elements of Western tonal harmony regulated by multiple theoretical and perceptual principles. Ideally, objective measures to evaluate chord progressions should reflect their tonal fitness . In this work, we propose an objective measure of the fitness of a chord progression within the Western tonal context computed in the Tonal Interval Space, where distances capture tonal music principles. The measure considers four parameters, namely tonal pitch distance, consonance, hierarchical tension and voice leading between the chords in the progression. We performed a listening test to perceptually assess the proposed tonal fitness measure across different chord progressions, and compared the results with existing related models. The perceptual rating results show that our objective measure improves the estimation of a chord progression’s tonal fitness in comparison with existing models.