Harmonieschemas

Harmonieschemas is a formalized framework for encoding harmonic information about musical works in structured data. They describe harmonic units such as chords, keys, scales, and progressions, and specify the permissible relationships among them—enabling consistent annotation, querying, and interchange of harmonic analyses across systems.

The concept emerged from music information retrieval and digital humanities communities seeking a standardized approach to represent analysis alongside performance data. Influenced by general schema languages for XML and JSON, harmonieschemas combine a metadata model with domain-specific constraints on harmony, allowing researchers and practitioners to capture both musical content and analytic interpretation in interoperable form.

A harmonieschema defines entities such as Chord, Key, Scale, Function, and Progression, and relations like “transits to,” “is in,” and “modulates to.” It supports constraints such as typical functional progressions in major and minor keys, voice-leading considerations, and cadential patterns. Schemas are designed to be serializable in formats such as JSON Schema, XML Schema, or RDF/OWL, enabling validation and integration with existing music data models and encodings like MEI or MusicXML. They may also carry metadata about tempo, style, or composer to situate harmonic analysis within broader musical context.

Applications of harmonieschemas include musicological analysis, music education, search and recommendation in music libraries, and automated tagging of harmonic structure in recordings and scores. An example would be encoding a short phrase in C major that follows a I–V–vi–IV progression, along with constraints and metrical position. The concept remains niche and is the subject of ongoing discussion about interoperability with established standards in music encoding.