Using feature-based composer classification to test musicological evidence for Josquin attribution

Cory McKay (Marianopolis College)*, Julie Cumming (McGill University)

This paper will be presented in person

Abstract:

The musicologists Jesse Rodin and Joshua Rifkin have presented an important taxonomy of works that could potentially be attributed to the Renaissance composer Josquin des Prez. It is broken into five categories indicating how strong the evidence is that Josquin was the composer of the given pieces, based primarily on historical evidence from sources and biography. We apply statistical analysis and machine learning to features extracted from the scores of all this music using our jSymbolic software to see how well a purely content-based approach supports (or contradicts) this taxonomy. We also identify particularly statistically characteristic features of Josquin’s style.