Sequential Learning for Tonal Analysis Daniele P. Radicioni Roberto Esposito Universit`a di Torino, Dipartimento di Informatica C.so Svizzera 185, 10149, Turin, Italy {radicion,esposito}@di.unito.it Abstract Tonal harmony analysis is arguably one of the most sophisticated tasks that musicians deal with. It combines general knowledge with contextual cues, being ingrained with both faceted and evolving objects, such as mu- sical language, execution style, or even taste. In the present work we in- troduce mare, a system for tonal analysis. Music is naturally represented in terms of sequences of sounding events. mare is a first attempt to auto- matically learn to analyse music using the recently developed framework of conditional models. The system is presented and assessed on a corpus of Western classical pieces from the 18 th to the late 19 th Centuries reper- toire. The results are discussed and interesting issues in modeling this problem are drawn. 1 Introduction Harmony analysis is arguably one of the most sophisticated tasks that musicians deal with. It combines general knowledge with contextual cues, being ingrained with both faceted and evolving objects, such as musical language, execution style, and even taste. Besides, analysis is a crucial step in order to deal with music. Performers, listeners, musicologists, automatic systems for performance, composition and accompaniment: all of them need to process and “understand” the pieces being composed, listened or performed. Consequently, analysis has been addressed by didactic literature [1]; psychological concerns have inspired theories about listeners perception [2], as well as about performers strategies and constraints [3]. Such seminal studies have been exploited to the end of devising automatic expressive performers in the AI field (see, e.g., [4, 5]). Within the broader area of the music analysis, we single out the task of tonal harmony analysis. Tonal harmony theory encodes how to build chords (i.e., which pitches compose each chord) and how to concatenate successions of chords. This task is, in general, a difficult one: in fact, music students spend considerable amounts of time in learning tonal harmony, which is still the base of both classical composer’s and performer’s background. The problem 1